Feminism and empire : Women activists in imperial Britain 1790 -1865

Contents:
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 The ‘woman question’ in imperial Britain 13; Civilisation, slavery and women’s rights 14;
Christianity and women’s privileges and influence 26; The ‘woman question’ in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah 32; Feminist Utopianism in James Henry Lawrence’s The Empire of the Nairs 36; The ‘woman question’ in imperial Britain 38;

2 Sweetness and power: the domestic woman and anti-slavery politics 41; ‘Patronesses of the fair SUGAR’: sugar, slavery and domesticity 44; ‘A Subject for Conversation at the Tea-Table’:
creating anti-slavery culture 47; ‘No more the blood-stain’d lux’ry choose’: purifying the body
of the nation 51; ‘We, the people … will emancipate him’: Elizabeth Heyrick and the radical politics of abstention 55; ‘Thy vessels crown’d with olive branches send’: promoting ‘legitimate’ imperial commerce 61; Evaluating women’s role in the slave-sugar boycott 63; viii Contents;

3 White women saving brown women?
British women and the campaign against sati 65 ‘A barbarous exertion of virtue?’ British women’s early representations of sati 67; ‘Family, fireside evils’: the foreign missionary movement and sati 70;
To ‘rescue from ignorance, and by that means from these funeral piles’: sati and female education 73;
‘Impelled by the convictions of conscience and the claims of benevolence’: female petitioners against sati 78;Abolition and beyond: evangelicals, Unitarians and the roots of imperial feminism 86;

4 Can women be missionaries?; Imperial philanthropy, female agency and feminism 92;
Foreign missionary organisations and the gendered division of missionary labour 94;
‘Christian psychobiography’ and the early female missionary memoir 99;
Jemima Thompson Luke’s personal memoir and the obstacles to single women’s missionary agency 105; Woman’s mission, Christian privilege and imperial duty 108; Surrogate mothers and orphan girls 111; Preaching, teaching and the limits of female evangelism overseas 116; Female missionary agency and feminism 120; 5 Feminism, colonial emigration and the new model Englishwoman 123;
Miss Bull: feminists and the new model Englishwoman 126; What the colonies could offer Miss Bull 131; What Miss Bull could offer the colonies 137;Race, ethnicity and migration in the early
women’s movement 142;Afterword 147;
Notes 150 Bibliography 185 Index 201