DEBATES ABOUT FEMALE EMIGRATION to the British colonies throughout the Victorian era routinely capitalize on the crucial role women could play in consolidating the empire through the civilizing mission. Advocates of female emigration frequently publicized the benefits of “matrimonial colonization,” a rendering of what is now called republican motherhood that defines women’s place in the nation in terms of their domestic and reproductive roles.1 The founding in 1862 of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES) by two educated middle-class women, Maria Rye and Jane Lewin, marked a departure from this conventional approach to female emigration. The work of the FMCES was carried out in the spirit of energy and determination that characterized the period of growing feminist activity in the 1860s, when the British rhetoric about “superfluous” women was reaching the tenor of a national crisis.2 While campaigns for improving female education and employment opportunities were long-term solutions to the problem, emigration offered a more immediate palliative. Concerned primarily with the plight of single, middle-class women, Rye and Lewin saw in emigration an alternative plot to the tragic denouement in poverty and spinsterhood that awaited a large proportion of Britain’s population of single, unemployed women. Ignoring the civilizing mission and the inducements for genteel women to marry or to become domestic servants in the colonies,3 Rye and Lewin instead focused on creating a class-differentiated access into colonialism by enabling single middle-class women, most of whom were governesses,