ABSTRACT
Even in a society where male predominance was general, the British Colonial Service was unusual in the degree to which it embodied masculine values. This is apparent both in the many reminiscences of empire published in the past twenty years, 1 and in the more academic studies (as yet fewer) of gender and office within the hierarchy of imperial bureaucracy. 2 It was marginally affected by the contribution of women in certain limited capacities, as in nursing and education, and by the appointment, at the very end of the colonial period, of a small number of Women Administrative Officers. 3 To quote Helen Callaway, the service was ‘a male institution in all its aspects: its masculine ideology, its military organization and processes, its rituals of power and hierarchy, its strong boundaries between the sexes’. 4 Yet for many years, from the publication of her first major academic book in 1937 to her retirement and the closing down of the Colonial Office in the mid-1960s, one woman was more widely known to members of the Colonial Service, across the Empire but above all in Africa, than any single colonial governor – with the possible exception of Lord Lugard. This was Margery Perham. It was perhaps her major personal achievement in a many-sided career.
