ABSTRACT
The Empire was frequently invoked as man’s world, a place where British women did not belong and could not survive. Sex ratios in most colonies only began to equalise in the twentieth century, and it was only late in the nineteenth century that officials began to regard the presence of women and family in the Empire as a positive factor likely to improve conditions. Throughout the imperial era, the dangers of unfettered and non-normative sexualities led to detailed regulation of marriage, age of consent, interracial sex and sexual conduct. Fears of homosexuality and hypersexuality as well as commercial sex led to increasingly restrictive laws, especially as more white women arrived in the colonies. Their lives were, for the most part, markedly different from those of colonial women, although both became involved in campaigns designed to improve the position of women in all societies.
