Overview
- Analyses the social, economic, and political structure of the Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women
- Argues that the Society pursued its own agenda to train and place educated women looking for non-domestic service work in the dominions
- Challenges earlier studies' focus on the Society’s failure to migrate a significant number of women from Britain to white settler colonies after 1924
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About this book
This book examines the British government’s response to the ‘superfluous women problem', and concerns about post-war unemployment more generally, by creating a migration society that was tasked with reducing the number of single women at home through overseas migration. The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women (SOSBW) was created in 1919 to facilitate the transportation of female migrants to the former white settler colonies. To do so, the SOSBW worked with various domestic and dominion groups to find the most suitable women for migration, while also meeting the dominions’ demands for specific types of workers, particularly women for work in domestic service. While the Society initially aimed to meet its original mandate, it gradually developed its own vision of empire settlement and refocused its efforts on aiding the migration of educated and trained women who were looking for new, modern, and professional work opportunities abroad.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bonnie White is Assistant Professor at the Grenfell Campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. She is also the author of The Women’s Land Army in First World War Britain (Palgrave, 2014).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women, 1919-1964
Authors: Bonnie White
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13348-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-13347-4Published: 26 March 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-13350-4Published: 14 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-13348-1Published: 18 March 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 222
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, Social History, Cultural History, Women's Studies, Migration