Empire's daughters traces the interconnected histories of girlhood, whiteness, and British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the study of the Girls' Friendly Society. The society functioned as both a youth organisation and emigration society, making it especially valuable in examining girls' multifaceted participation with the empire. The book charts the emergence of the organisation during the late Victorian era through its height in the first decade of the twentieth century to its decline in the interwar years. Employing a multi-sited approach and using a range of sources, including correspondences, newsletters, and scrapbooks, the book uncovers the ways in which girls participated in the empire as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators of colonial knowledge and also how they resisted these prescribed roles and challenged systems of colonial power.

Reviews

'Building on robust feminist scholarship that has recovered women's and girls' experiences from the margins of colonial histories, Elizabeth Dillenburg's Empire's Daughters forms a nuanced and well-written contribution to the intersecting histories of girlhoods and empire... Empire's Daughters deepens our understanding of girlhoods in British imperial history, both as a lived experience and as a symbolic category, as well as how girls understood and engaged with the colonial project.'
Chiara Candaele, Gender & History

"Elizabeth Dillenburg has produced a thoughtful, multi-faceted revisionist study which addresses significant but neglected themes from the history of the Girls' Friendly Society and makes a useful contribution to the corpus of scholarship on female migration." 
Marjory Harper, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

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