| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Adele Perry. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871. (Studies in Gender and History.) Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2001. Pp. viii. 286. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95.

This book is best read backward. Adele Perry argues that the project to bring white women to colonial British Columbia between 1859 and 1870—which culminated in a series of "assisted female immigration schemes"—was self-consciously designed to transform a racially diverse and largely homosocial "backwoods" culture into a heteronormative and uniformly white settler society. In chapter six, she recounts how the Columbia Emigration Society and the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society, in cooperation with the colonial government and local reformers, sponsored three "brideships" to transport women from England to the colonial capital, Victoria in 1869 and the early 1870s. The vessels sailed in response to incompatible colonial desires. Miners and farmers sought wives but also dancers, bartenders, and prostitutes; feminist reformers wanted jobs for unemployed middle-class women; the bourgeoisie demanded household servants. Yet white women were expected, above all, to bring "gentility, morality, and piety" to the new colony (p. 139).

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