In this article, I examine the content of two issues of The Empire Annual for Girls in order to explore the messages it sought to convey to its readers about the nature of femininity and the role of women in an anxious post-war climate.[2] The Empire Annual for Girls[3] was one of the Religious Tract Society’s many children’s publications alongside the rather more famous Girls’ Own Paper and Boys’ Own Paper.  Unlike those well studied publications, it is rare to find a mention of the EAG in scholarly books and papers.  However, the annual’s declared focus on the Empire makes it of particular interest as, despite the fact that most scholars and critics observe that girls’ literature of the post-war period reflects the newly powerful reconstituted separate spheres ideology, the EAG contains many stories with a colonial setting and articles about women in the Empire which promote an active adventurous girlhood followed not only (or necessarily) by marriage but by public life.[4]

EAG began in 1909 and appears to have ended in 1930.[5]  Earlier editions were edited by the Rev A.R. Buckland who was secretary of the RTS as well as author and editor of numerous religious publications, while the 1924 edition studied here was edited by A.L. Haydon who also edited the RTS’s Boys’ Own Book of Adventure.  Many of the authors have slipped entirely into obscurity but some were prolific and apparently extremely popular children’s authors such as Ethel Talbot and Doris Pocock.[6]  Like the Girls’ Own Paper it seems to have been intended for largely middle-class girls of eleven or twelve and over and even contained some stories depicting young married life, which vary from a positive vision of a partnership of equals to Ethel Talbot’s ‘Inspiration’ in which the young wife’s childlike nature and inability to earn her living is seen to be part of her attractiveness for her author husband.  Their happiness is threatened when she tries to write herself and so is too busy to make her husband’s tea, but luckily she is such a bad writer that harmony is soon restored.[7] 

Such thinly disguised hostility to intelligent working women was entirely in accord with the post-war period’s dominant mood of highly psychologised anti-feminism, generally agreed by historians to be a result of the violence of the First World War and the polarisation of men and women’s wartime experiences.[8]  The feminist movement itself was experiencing continuing and deepening conflict over its aims and direction.[9]  And, despite wartime employment opportunities and the newly granted vote, the reinstatement of traditional gender divisions had come to be associated with re-establishing normality after the war.[10]  The War had also revealed the poor state of the nation’s physical health and reignited fin de siècle fears of British degeneracy and strengthened nationalist/imperialist[11] convictions of women’s primary duty to marry and continue the race.  The popular press played on these fears and created a moral panic about the masculine behaviour and appearance of young women.[12]

Girls’ periodicals would seem to be a good source for examining both these tensions over appropriate gender norms and how they were communicated to older girls and teenagers, because of the immediacy of their writing and production and because, as essentially juvenile literature, their didacticism means values are made particularly clear.[13]  The feminist student examining girls’ magazines of the 1920s could, therefore, expect to be appalled by stories and articles holding up traditional femininity as a model and no doubt contributing to the damaging diet of juvenile reading, such as that described by O’Keefe as still causing her problems in her fifties.[14]

Mitchell found that girls' publications did indeed respond rapidly to the changing culture, and began to include many more romances into their repertoire and to show a new disapproval of women who worked outside the home.  She observes that the very positive all-girl culture that had previously been represented in girls’ fiction quickly disappeared after the end of the First World War and that, where pre-war stories had been designed to appeal to a wide age-range, they now divided into either children’s stories or love stories focussed on the male.[15]  However, the EAG, despite its inclusion of some love stories, was still offering a largely positive vision between 1920-5.  It contains school stories, mystery adventures (often the same thing), natural history, careers advice and tales of the lives of inspirational women.  It by no means advocates a ‘reestablishment of separate spheres’,[16] although there are plenty of characters sacrificing themselves for their families.  Some of the stories and articles hold up higher education and work as high ideals and some clearly offer up the lives of women in high positions as models for their young readers.  The girl characters frequently behave in ways previously only available to boys and are shown to be independent and active and even physically brave and heroic.  The annuals provide rich evidence of changing and competing conceptions of the ideal English girl and of the difficulties entailed in reconciling these into a reasonably coherent ideology of femininity.

The annual has an obviously imperial title and it might be expected that the ‘Empire’ element of these annuals for girls would be a restrictive, backward looking part of the mix of ideas of femininity but this is not the case.  Rather, it seems that the Empire may be responsible for its bolder approach to gender.  The many stories of the British Empire, whether set in the white settler nations; Canada, Australia and South Africa, or in ‘uncivilized’ imperial possessions, are frequently used to provide a background that allows girl characters to be particularly daring and heroic, (although some stories do manage to add romance in too).  This may, at first, appear surprising, as imperialism is often seen as requiring women merely to breed, and Victorian domestic ideology was integral to Victorian British imperialist thought.  Women's role was 'biological and spiritual'[17] and the domesticated woman was seen as evidence of Britain 's place as the highest and most civilized nation.[18]  However, this conception of women within imperialist thought was changing and it was largely women who changed it.[19]  Although feminism is often said to be anti-imperialist, [20] many feminists and suffragists had stressed women’s role in the Empire as mothers of the Empire and nurturers of the imperial family.  They argued for the need to educate and give women the vote, in order for them to take their place in the imperial nation and exercise the special spiritual and moral authority attributed to them in Victorian domestic ideology.  Therefore, it can be argued that nationalistic, patriotic and imperialist ideals were an integral part of women’s struggle to reinvent femininity.[21]  Indeed, Midgley says that feminist thinking was equally important to imperialism arguing that ‘feminist propaganda from 1790 onwards helped consolidate the sense of Western superiority that came to underpin…notions of Britain ’s imperial civilising mission.’[22]  And so an initially unlikely combination of ‘new girl’ thinking and imperialism makes sense viewed in this light.  Imperialists who would certainly not have considered themselves in sympathy with feminists found themselves in agreement with arguments which stressed the need for women’s health, fitness and commitment to their role as mothers of the nation.  Furthermore, many imperialist writers for the young engaged in what Bratton calls ‘complex ideological manoeuvres’[23] to incorporate new active ideas of girl and womanhood, whilst retaining older ideas of women’s moral and spiritual role and primary commitment to marriage and a family.

The EAG provides fascinating reading in the light of this complex mix of ideas.  Fiction for the young can be considered to be inevitably didactic, even if its authors do not intend it to be so.  However, in this case, deliberate didacticism was undoubtedly part of its appeal, at least to any adult purchasers.[24]  Its publishers, the Religious Tract Society,[25] were primarily evangelists and the annuals accordingly contain some specifically Christian items, as well as a more subtle infusion of generalised Christian ideology throughout.[26]  The intended audience is clearly middle class; a startling number of characters are the daughters of vicarages.  Homes come with servants, and schools are usually the elite boarding schools, although changing times can be read in one story which has boarding-school girls being taught to run a home and cook a meal.[27]  The absolute respectability of the publication in many ways increases its interest, for if, as Bratton says, ‘Periodicals for the young are often the site of the sharpest conflicts over socialisation’,[28] then, this is a shot from what should be the conservative side.  And, although in terms of class, it certainly is, its treatment of gender is often deeply challenging to traditional ideas of femininity, even in contributions by male authors.  Although Empire is a key element in some of the more startlingly subversive stories, its presence is not always obvious.[29]  However, ideals of empire are as integral as the deliberately half-buried Christianity, and they combine to offer the young reader a powerful vision of an ideal British/ Imperial/ Christian girl and thus, of course, define her opposite or ‘Other’.[30]

Burton argues that, because British feminists invented new definitions of womanhood within imperialist ideology, they did so over and against the ‘Other’ of the colonised degraded women of Britain ’s Imperial possessions.[31]  She points out the continuity of discourse between suffragists, female missionaries and other female reformers of empire, including Josephine Butler.[32]  This relationship can be clearly seen throughout the EAG. Volume 12 of 1920-1 has several stories of missionaries which clearly demonstrate the relationships between reconstituted ideals of British femininity, a corresponding ‘Othering’ of female colonial subjects and an idealised and highly moralised imperialism.  The story ‘Light in Darkness’[33] utilises a  traditional Biblical trope of light and dark to contrast Christian British values and people with ‘Mohammedan’ or ‘pagan’ ‘superstition’[s].  This is later repeated using contrasting skin colours for further emphasis:

At one side stood a table, covered by a white cloth, on which were a primitive lamp and a Bible.  The darkness, the rows of dusky faces just revealed by the flickering light…made up a strange picture[34]

White skin colour becomes associated with the light of Christ as so often in moralising imperialist discourse.  The missionaries work especially with ‘native’ women who are depicted as childlike with ‘mental limitations’[35] in contrast to the missionaries’ bravery and intelligence.  They overcome the ‘ignorance and horror, superstition and cruelty’[36] of ‘native’ traditions to teach ‘native’ women how to care for their children; to doctor and nurse the sick and to rescue and nurture badly treated children.  This depiction of maternalistic white women rescuing black women from their plight was perhaps becoming rather ‘old-fashioned’ by 1920 as Bush notes that among feminist activists ‘in the inter-war period there was not even the ‘maternalist’ identification of ‘female issues’ characteristic of pre-war feminism that linked moral reform of empire with concern for female colonial ‘others’.[37]  It seems likely that it is the consciously religious rather than feminist focus of the piece that accounts for this. Where the missionaries adopted traditional male roles of exploring and ruling it is emphasised that this is almost against their will, ‘it was a work she did not like, and she only accepted it because she thought it in line with her allegiance to Christ.’[38]  They do it as part of their Christian duty, as an expression of women’s especial moral and spiritual authority and as an extension of their nurturing role as mothers of the Empire.  Readers are given extra reassurance of the women’s femininity by the repeated emphasis on their role in helping children and on their taste for ‘pretty clothes.’[39]

Despite the heavy stress on babies and pretty dresses, the language and ‘plots’ of these women’s life stories place them in a masculine tradition of action, adventure and quest rather than a feminine story of passive endurance and fortitude.  They leave their homes and ‘go lonely forth from their motherland’;[40] they ‘exhibit…coolness in danger’; they ‘march’; they have ‘narrow escapes from brigands’[41] and ‘establish just laws and protect the poor’[42] resembling female Christian knights.  The concept of the chivalrous knight had become central to the idea of the English gentleman by the end of the nineteenth century.[43]  However, by the 1920s, this knightly imagery was not unusual in writing about patriotic women and girls, as during the First World War writers had begun to depict English girls with the same chivalric and knightly attributes as boys.[44]  The reader of this article is offered a positive vision of women’s abilities to succeed in the Empire.  Despite Raife’s qualifications that such ‘an adventurous disposition’ is unusual and that ‘the greater number of women find ample outlet for their ambitions and abilities in the duties of domesticity’,[45] the piece nonetheless allows girls to imagine themselves in a bold independent role without any of the possible difficulties a girl reader might feel in identifying with male heroes.  Although it is certainly true that many girls happily read boys’ adventure stories and imagined themselves in male roles[46] it does seems that some readers, even before the First World War, certainly found it unsettling, as can be seen in a letter from a girl in 1911 complaining to the Boys Own Paper that ‘a girl might long to be a boy.’[47]  In the post-war climate girls who liked adventure stories might have new reasons for preferring to avoid stories with male heroes intended for boys, for, as Kelly Boyd shows, these stories took on the hostile character of the times, including women only as ‘objects of derision’.[48]

Many of the adventure stories in the EAG are set in girls’ boarding schools.  Mackay and Thane have described how after the War chivalric and ‘heroic elements were integrated into the schoolgirl of the new popular magazines.’[49]  English girls’ school stories acquired a function similar to that of boys’ stories of the time by displaying their young heroines as conforming to an active ideal of (implicitly and sometimes explicitly imperial) Englishness consisting of honour, bravery and modesty.[50]  This can certainly be seen in many of the school stories in both available volumes of the EAG.  ‘Beginner’s Luck’ in Volume 16 is fairly typical; five members of the hockey team go away for the weekend and by a combination of bravery, quick thinking and team work manage to foil a burglar.  Despite the danger, the chief heroine declares, ‘it’s silly to be frightened’[51], showing much the same dismissive attitude to fear as that held by the missionary women.  The girls regard the whole thing as a great adventure and modestly ascribe their success to good luck.  School stores are clearly important in the annuals, taking up about a fifth of the space.  They are frequently adventure stories with a moral or straightforwardly instructive morality tales, warning of the dangers of boastfulness, or of being judgemental or vain or snobbish.  Girls in these stories seem capable of anything and the authors often carry the action forward to show us how a character ends up at Girton or becomes ‘one of the most respected women in England ’.[52]  They are only rarely romantic stories; frequently there are no males at all, except occasionally when a policeman turns up to remove a villain neatly bagged by the girls.  Many critics have observed that this all-female world of school stories of the period is one of the most empowering aspects of the genre for its young readers, as all roles become available to females.[53]

This is certainly the case in the Empire Annuals where school stories contain female authority figures, and transgressive figures, as well as heroic figures who can be remarkably strong and even physically aggressive.  In the story of ‘The Black Thirteen’, girls break ‘into the gymnasium… [to] get some Indian clubs’[54] and surround some criminals and beat them until the police come.  That the weapons are sports equipment is significant for sport is just as important in the girls' school story as it is in boys’ school stories of the day, often being central to the plot, and it is frequently sport which creates the opportunity for the girls to be heroic leaders.[55]  Mitchell considers that sports in girls’ school fiction operated as a sign of independent ‘new-style girlhood.’[56]  It also undoubtedly served to place this ‘new-style’ girl within existing concepts of the imperial nation by including girls’ schools and girls’ sport into the powerful set of metaphors within imperialist thinking which linked together school, sport and imperial rule.  Heroines are usually sporty and can be seen to have learned their bravery and athleticism and gained their healthy, strong bodies from sports and games.  The EAG is unambiguously in favour of sport and physical exercise and both annuals contain factual articles encouraging sports, as well as stories which give it prominence.  Golf is encouraged for, ‘if you want a healthy mind, you must have a sound body’ and, the reader is told, golf teaches ‘self-control and discipline’.[57]  There is no sign of the anxiety felt towards strong girls expressed by some earlier commentators[58]; female strength and health and activity have even been redefined as national characteristics:

see for yourselves what rowing can do for women and girls in the way of making them healthy and strong; beautiful in face and figure; well developed, attractive, real fine English lassies.[59]

This is a startling change from the delicate ideal Englishwoman of Victorian domestic ideology, and aligns the body of the idealised English girl with that of the male, without losing her distinctive sexuality, for surely ‘well developed’ implies rounded breasts and she is still ‘beautiful’ and ‘attractive’.[60]  It was commonplace to assume that games taught ‘most, if not all of the qualities that conduce to the supremacy of our country’[61] and here and in schoolgirl fiction if not always in wider thought, this is extended to the female too.  Like the schoolboy, she will need her body for the service of her imperial nation and in the Empire Annual for Girls as in much schoolgirl literature it is not its maternal uses that are shown but heroic ones.  However, a mysterious allusion to the need for care at ‘certain times’ and an instruction to girls to accept that they are weaker than men remind the reader of her second-rate physical status, something that rarely crops up in the fiction.[62]  The heroines of ‘The Black Thirteen’ are all members of a newly formed school swimming club at the local baths. It is interesting that, ‘the swimming bath was to be kept for ladies and for schoolgirls for three afternoons a week,’ something for which feminists often campaigned.[63] Swimming was accordingly strongly associated with feminism and it is remarkable that several heroines in both volumes of the EAG studied here use their newly acquired swimming abilities to rescue people from drowning or even swim a swollen river to fetch a doctor.

In ‘One Crowded Hour’, the heroine, Marty, is so anxious to fulfil her daydream of saving lives, that when asked by a filmmaker if she can swim in order to take part in his film she assumes there is a real drowning[64]:

Swim! Marty’s blue eyes opened; she was a guide and leader of her patrol; she had a crowd of badges on her right arm and the Swimmer’s Badge was only one of them[65]

It is significant that Marty is a Guide, for the close connections between sport and Empire were often made explicit in Guide literature and fiction of this period.  The first Girl Guide handbook of 1912 was even subtitled ‘How girls can help to build the Empire’.[66]  As a possessor of a Guide sports badge Marty (and any young guide readers[67]) would certainly have been aware of the school/sport/Empire connections as in order to qualify for the Guides’ sportswoman’s badge girls had to memorise Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada[68]

The sand of the desert is sodden red…
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
Play up! Play up! and play the game![69]

Guides would not expect to grow up to fight on ‘sodden red’ sand but one of the aims of Guiding was to allow girls to participate in ‘boyish’ outdoor physical activities (safely separated from boy scouts) and thanks to the influence of Baden-Powell it laid heavy emphasis on the importance of girls being equipped for a possible future life on the frontiers of the Empire where old style womanhood would be inadequate.[70] Although girls’ roles as future wives and mothers were not played down, even future marital relationships were portrayed as comradely. [71]

The stories in the EAG which are set in the Empire display precisely this new model of femininity.  They show young women who are given the opportunity to be extraordinarily brave in a way unimaginable at home (even in a school story).  Given the chance to visit Borneo and go ‘miles from civilisation,’[72] Vera Carpenter finds herself racing a tropical storm, with a blinded young man who only her bravery and driving ability can save.  There are plenty of ‘coolies’ who are never even considered as rescuers, and it is made explicit that as a white woman Vera shares the British men’s abilities and superiority when the reader is told, ‘when there were only two white men on a plantation…one had to take the rough with the smooth’[73].  Vera’s role is exactly that of the young hero using her body and strength to look after the weak:

she sat fixed…with arms aching and her eyes aching…But she stuck to it with never a word to give the man at her side a hint that she found her task hard[74]

Vera is a visitor to the frontiers of Empire but even more extraordinary heroism is shown by New Zealander Mary and it is her colonial upbringing that gives her the fearlessness and physical prowess she needs:

Mary had lived much out of doors from her cradle, was a fearless rider, an active girl, tall, healthy, the very embodiment of supple graceful woman-hood; indeed the fault her feminine acquaintances found with her was that she was too much of a tomboy. [75]

It is clear from the author’s tone and subsequent events that to be ‘feminine’ is less admirable than to be a ‘tomboy’.  Indeed, she is the ‘embodiment’ of this new colonial ideal of womanhood.  Mary rides miles, fords a raging torrent on horseback three times and gets the doctor to her ill brother.  However, she faints at the last moment and nearly drowns only to be rescued by a handsome neighbour.  This sudden restoration of traditional femininity and weakness is followed by an equally traditional ending as she endures an anxious motherly wait at the bedside of her ill brother and is finally married to her handsome rescuer.  This trajectory from modern to traditional femininity was noted by Bratton in her study of imperialist girls’ fiction.  She observes the same action in virtually all imperial adventure stories with active heroines, their bravery collapses when their activity is too masculine and the heroine ‘faints away, overcome by the conflicting imperatives of Englishness and femininity.’[76]  It is certainly true of the adventure stories in the EAG.  Marty also faints after her unnecessary rescue swim and another heroine, Gwen, rushes to rescue her brother from a burglar but on seeing him is frozen into feminine stillness.[77] In all the stories this female ‘weakness’ achieves positive results; Marty is invited to train to act by a famous cinema star, and the burglar thinks Gwen is a ghost and runs away. 

The tension between older ideas of femininity and new ideals of active independence is at its most clear in these adventure stories.  Although it seems that imperialist thinking, undoubtedly influenced by feminism, further revised notions of English femininity, the vision offered in the EAG is complex and somewhat contradictory.  Bratton’s study of girls’ imperialist fiction concludes that imperialist revisions of femininity are an incorporation and to some extent a neutralisation of female desires for activity and freedom.[78]  This line of argument is strengthened by Mackay and Thane’s conclusion that tensions between competing ‘images of women [were] reconciled by assigning them to different stages of life.’[79]  Girls are allowed to be active but must grow up and into traditional women and mothers.[80]  As has been seen this movement is sometimes evident in the EAG and even Vera’s story ends with gender roles restored as she waits for the young man she rescued (returned to health and strength) to arrive with an offer of marriage.  Heroines of the romances who are on the verge of adult life are usually presented as fairly conventional passive heroines and motherhood and self-sacrifice for family are held up for readers’ admiration. 

The romance ‘Playing the Game’ offers a domesticated wife-to-be as the ideal of English femininity.  She is a ‘typical English girl’ a: 

charming maiden…rather above the average height, of a lovely blonde type, with the sweetest of blue eyes, and the most pleasant face imaginable…a maid to be proud of, a woman calculated to make folk love her and confide in her with their joy and sorrows their pleasures and troubles.[81]

The author, George Wade, uses medieval language to describe Englishness,[82] but his ‘maid’ that ‘folk love’ is a passive princess rather than a knight.  Her fiancé is tempted to take a bribe and lose a football game until he reads a timely letter from a friend out in the empire.  Claude writes of how ‘in this trying climate and amid these worrying surroundings’ he is often tempted away from ‘the line of duty and honour’ but so far he has ‘stood fast to the school’s traditions… kept the flag flying… [and] always played the game’.[83]  Although Lillian and her fiancé are at home, it is the imperialist values learned on the school sports field and enacted in the empire that keep them pure.  But in this case imperialism encourages a purely conventional femininity.  Lillian even declares that, ‘the grandest lesson a great school can ever teach its boys is that they shall always “play the game” whatever happens’[84]  excluding girls and herself from the ‘game’.  These stories conform to the pattern observed by Mackay and Thane, and Bratton and also identified and condemned by Roberta Trites in much ‘classic’ fiction for girls (some dating from much earlier than the EAG) in which girls lose their agency and voice as they grow toward adulthood and adult relationships.[85]  However, these stories by no means provide the dominant model of growth in the EAG and it is clear that despite the passivity of some of the romantic heroines and the emphasis on the traditionally feminine aspects of some of the bolder women, overall the EAG offers its young readers a decidedly empowering vision of female abilities and female choices in their future lives to their young readers. 

Many of the school stories even conform to one of Trites’ main criteria for a feminist children’s novel in that the young female protagonists begin and end the story with agency and voice.[86]  And the school stories also show a model of adult femininity decidedly different from the passive romantic heroine.  Headteachers (the ultimate power) are always female and these stories also frequently contain particularly admirable unmarried teachers who are ex-Girton or a ‘BA London…the cleverest sister a fellow ever had-and the best!’[87] thus displaying a different, active and intelligent future for girls.

The factual articles reinforce this message; one author gives detailed advice on getting scholarships into higher education and offers her readers a glowing future:

What prizes await our girls who have the good sense, the power, the desire, to utilise these chances to the full? Well think of the salaries and successes women are making to-day to what they were but ten years back! Such splendid professional women as our great writers, painters, musicians, doctors and teachers may earn anything up to £1000 a year without being at all in the highest rank.[88]

Britishness is as always key to the positive vision of the Empire Annuals in both the fiction and the fact and the repeated possessive ‘our’ reminds the reader that they are British girls belonging to the nation.  The most ambitious future offered to the reader is unsurprisingly an imperial one.  In ‘The Woman Chief of Mesopotamia’ the author emphasises the role of Gertrude Bell’s Oxford education and determination in achieving her ‘power, success, influence and dominance’ but he also heavily emphasises the role of her Britishness in her success by repeatedly utilising oriental stereotypes about the ‘woman in the East’[89] who is ‘secluded and kept ignorant, politically, educationally, socially and nationally.’[90]  He compares Bell to other women ‘explorers, travellers, world-workers of various kinds’ but he ‘rate[s] Bell ‘the greatest of them all’, even above missionary women precisely because she demonstrates women’s abilities.  He ends:

This lady from the University of Oxford has proved that there is to-day no limit to the ambitions goals and heights a woman can put before her in a dozen ways.  She has shown almost more than any other British woman, that hence forth any career, and any height of it is open to the really clever, able ardent, true woman.  She has begun a new era in our national life.[91]

This is an undeniably feminist statement and a deliberate challenge to backward- looking ideas of traditional femininity.  The advancement of women in public life is seen as modern and exciting but is made safe both by its location within the empire and by the demonstration of female authority as essentially British.  

This feminist and empowering tone provides the dominant note in a fascinating mix of representations of femininity throughout the EAG and it would therefore seem that a view that girls' magazines in this period fall into line with a new domestic ideology is only partly correct.  Tinkler observed a very similar attitude to girls’ careers to that shown in EAG in its sister title, The Girls’ Own Paper.  She explains the difference largely in terms of the class base of its readership and also to a growing post-war realism among parents and educators that even girls who married might meet financial difficulties or be widowed and need to support themselves.[92]  Where working class girls’ magazines often portrayed work as a necessary interval before the real business of marriage and frequently showed career girls regretting their choice, the middle-class Girls’ Own Paper took careers just as seriously as the EAG and offered regular advice on the subject.  It is, surely, undoubtedly also the case that the imperial/patriotic focus of the RTS's children's publications contributed greatly to this positive view of women's abilities to contribute to the Empire and the nation.[93]  The two are not of course unconnected; concepts of idealised imperial womanhood are bound up with class.[94]  Despite the very real ‘wave of anti-feminism’[95] that was the background against which these magazines were written it is clear for their writers a Britain and British Empire which held women such as Gertrude Bell, which had recently passed the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act 1919, and two years after the ‘prizes’ offered in EAG 12’s careers article, appointed its first women solicitor, was an exciting place full of hope for their privileged young readers.

Throughout the EAG, concepts of Empire and Britishness have been used as a way to negotiate the trickier aspects of changing ideologies of femininity.  While the presence of some stories in which active heroines decline into passive wives and girlfriends may well have had the effect, imagined by Bratton, of curtailing girls’ dreams of their future, and preventing concepts of Empire being too liberating and threatening already destabilised gender boundaries, it is hard to imagine they entirely negated the powerful images of British girlhood which invoked all the might of prevailing myths of imperial Britishness.  Noble knightly missionaries, honourable schoolgirls, adventurous colonials and intellectual females in authority have all been presented for the reader as models and teachers both openly and buried in fiction.  Many feminist scholars (and I) believe with Mitchell that reading has an ‘effect on girls’ inner lives, their personal horizons and standards, their image of self and potential.’[96]  Middle class white British girls reading The Empire Annual for Girls can surely have found affirmation, a rich source of fantasy and a sense of choice about their futures and personal horizons stretching as far as the largest empire the world has ever known.[97]  

 

Notes

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