Women of the Raj

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality, Canadian History to
1967, and Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Osc

In the era of globalization, the past remains a foreign country where
our minds are allowed to explore any number of exotic items. British
women in imperial India from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries
share such alluring qualities. Whereas the introduction of white women
to the imperial possessions of the South Asian continent was once
decried as the beginning of the deterioration in Anglo–Indian
relations, University of Toronto historian and provost Margaret
MacMillan relished no such chestnuts in her 1988 book Women of the Raj.
MacMillan’s tremendous success in her more recent prizewinning and
bestselling study of the Treaty of Versailles, Paris 1919, has led her
publisher to reissue this volume with a new introduction.

MacMillan’s study of British women in India begins with the voyage
out, first impressions of a strange land, the sense of loneliness and
isolation, the elements of life and society, and women feeling
threatened by situations in which they exercised little control. The
author also examines courtship and marriage, children, housekeeping and
relations with servants, social life and amusements, vacations,
unconventional (primarily single) women, and women caught in the
increasing pace of change in the world around them.

Many scholars will see Women of the Raj as frozen in time and out of
sympathy with current intellectual fashions. MacMillan wrote the book
during a time when many historians simply wanted to write women into
history in order to edge out the exclusive focus on men; academic tastes
have since shifted to such things as gender relations and post-colonial
comparisons. Similarly, as the author herself acknowledges, approaches
to British imperial history have also altered greatly over the past two
decades.

Whatever deficiencies the specialist discerns in Women of the Raj, the
book’s fine narrative style, sound research, and agreeable prose will
engage readers.