Wome n’s Sfudia hr. Forum. Vol. IO. No. 3, pp. 305-309. 1987. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI om-nnm sm+ .oo Rimed in the USA. eon Jounals Ltd. ‘THE mHER HALF?‘: SOURCES ON BRITISH FEMALE EMIGRATION AT THE FAWCETT LIBRARY, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE To AUSTRALIA zyxwvutsrqponmlkj PAULA HAMILTON School of Humanities and Social Sciences, New South Wales institute of Technology, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007. Australia JANICE zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM GUTHARD Murdoch University, Western Australia .Department of History, Murdoch University, Western Austmlia 6150 Feminist historians now turning to recon- struct our own past find a great many ab- sences. Migration is a field where it has been particulary difficult to locate the women within the demographic records and examine their experience of migration as separate from the dominant assumptions about the movement of peoples from Britain to other parts of the Empire overseas. Now the task is not simply reclamation, but the question of a how to write a history which asks different questions of the sources. The Fawcett library collection can help with this task. Though some of the sources on migration have al- ready been utilised in work on female emi- gration to Australia, Canada, and South Africa, this article suggests that there is a need to reassess the collection at the Fawcett in the light of more recent feminist research methods and approaches. In this case, both of us were researching major projects involv- ing aspects of female working class migra- tion from Britain to Australia. Janice Goth- ard’s brief for a doctoral thesis was broad: an analysis of the assisted emigration of single women from Britain to Australia between 1860 and 1920, concentrating on the role played by the various Australian colonial and state governments. Paula Hamilton, on the other hand, was examining migration and training in the 1920s as one of the sources of recruitment for her study of Australian do- mestic service. She had a much narrower fo- cus on the provision of labour and training for the receiving country’s employment mar- ket, with a particular interest in the investiga- tion of increased government regulation of women’s lives during this period. Both topics required some examination of the role of pri- vate societies, which at times worked directly with colonial and state governments to facili- tate and encourage emigration. The Fawcett collection includes most of the extant records of these private societies, some of which have already been used extensively by writers con- cerned with either middle-class women as emigrants or those investigating middle-class philanthropic societies involved with the or- ganisation of emigration. Fewer scholars have used these records in conjunction with official sources for a wider study of working- class migrants to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa.’ In the Australian case, though the inter- ests of the British Women’s Emigration As- sociation (BWEA) and the later Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women (SOSBW) may have been directed more to- wards middle-class women, financial consid- erations dictated that the emigration of working-class women whose passages were paid or subsidised by Australian colonial or state governments would dominate the Au- stralian work of these societies. This always created a tension between the long-standing aim of those private societies and the stated requirements of government authorities fi- nancing the planned migration programmes. ‘Of the studies on middle-class emigmtion, Ham- merton’s (1979) is the most compreh&sivc though Eriksen (1983) Buckley (1977) and Van Helton (1983) all cover relevant aspects of single female emipmtion to America, Canada, and South Africa. For other work on Australian middk class emi- grants, see Clarke (1985) and Sales (1984). Barber (1980) and MacDonald (1983) have carried out recent studies of working-class female emigration. 305