ABSTRACT

Travel to India was made easier with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, encouraging young European women to make journeys to the subcontinent for matrimonial purposes. Men who had made fortunes in India as officers in the Raj were ideal to many families back home as matches for their marriageable daughters, making the risky enterprise of sea voyages quite worthwhile. Despite the steady influx of women, the British Empire remained a masculine arena. This was crucial to the construction of a British masculine identity amongst the men stationed particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Significantly, the extent of women’s involvement in their husbands’ work freed them from the position of the subordinate and instead empowered them enough to be able to become directly involved with the Raj, albeit unofficially. There was no archetypal memsahib with a specific type of travelling experience.