White women in Fiji 1835-1930 : questions of gender and race

For most historians European women have been irrelevant to significant themes in the history of Fiji since European contact. The paucity of material about their lives is seen to confirm their unimportance. Yet such women, and European women in other multi-racial colonial societies, have been regarded as the cause of deteriorating race relations between white and black, and even as the downfall of empires. In this thesis it is suggested that the above assertion is related to the characteristic images of white women in mixed-race colonial societies; negative images which are present in literary and academic writing and popular imagination. The thesis endeavours to explore the reality of white women's lives in Fiji and the correspondence between this reality, the images and the race-relations hypothesis. A variety of sources, including interviews, are utilised to establish the details of the lives of European women in Fiji from 1835 - 1930. Information about their paid and unpaid work, leisure activities and social relationships is provided. Contemporary ideas about white women and black men are examined, and their importance in Fiji. Particular attention is directed to issues identified by others as crucial to women's relationships with black people, that is, to the arrival of European women at the time of the settler rush in 1870 and 1871, and to the mistress-servant relationship. The prevailing images of European women, and the hypothesis that white women caused racial tension, are assessed in the light of this evidence from Fiji and found wanting. I put forward the idea that academic and other writers have used European women as scapegoats, to explain problems in the race relations area, by incorporating nineteenth century ideologies of gender into twentieth century historical and sociological explanations