The empire as ‘outlet' for single women
To those who proposed colonisation as a remedy to depopulation, female colonial emigration would provide a one-stone-two-birds solution. For not only would it make available eligible women as potential wives for the large number of bachelor settlers desperately wanting to establish families in the colonies; it would also solve the problem of ‘excess’ single women in the metropole.
In its pamphlet, the SFEF states that one of its goals is to help women, in particular those ‘1,302,471 unmarried females between the age of 25 and 50’, the majority of whom have to work to earn their living. The unhappy plight of these ‘redundant’ women is one of the main issues Chailley-Bert addressed in his inauguration speech. He had identified two causes for the redundancy of this particular segment of the population. One was the inability of many parents to provide an attractive dowry, without which they could not marry off their daughters. With the exception of the poorest industrial workers, the question of dowry occupied a central place in marriage arrangements at almost all class levels in France.26 Indeed, the lack of a dowry could be a cause of deep anguish in young women, as seen in this letter addressed to the SFEF by one of its applicants: ‘I must acknowledge... that in France, I shall always remain what you call a “non-valeud” (worthless), despite being twenty years old, since I do not have a dowry’.27The second reason is the widespread female unemployment created partly by the rapidly increasing number of educated young women from the working class. In Salaires et miseres de femmes, the Comte d’Haussonville devoted an entire section of his study to the condition of unemployed educated women whom he referred to as the non-classees, that is, ‘young women who, born in a working-class milieu, have made an effort to elevate themselves without having succeeded, and who, uncertain of their future, oscillate between the condition that they left and that which they have not yet been able to attain’.28 According to Haussonville, these non-classees were created by the compulsory schooling introduced by the Third Republic, which produced a large number of women with diplomas looking for employment commensurate with their education.
This situation, in the words of Chailley-Bert, gave rise to a ‘stock of young women without employment and future’.29 The concern, Haussonville wrote, is that these single women who were non-classees would run the great risk of becoming declassees. The only remedy to this predicament was marriage, which was the sole ‘true career for woman’.30 It is with regard to this ‘crisis’ situation that the colonies, which indeed suffered a severe shortage of French women, were proposed as a place to unload the metropole’s ‘overstock’ of single females.The view of the colonies as a good ‘outlet’ for the nation’s spinsters had at the turn of the century found support from different quarters in the metropole. In her book on female emigration, Corneau expressed her heartfelt sympathy for those unfortunate women who
armed with a diploma, their training certificate in hand, teachers of music or voice, miniaturists or seamstresses, pound the pavement of Paris in search of the mediocre little job that will prevent them from dying of hunger, like the miserable teacher who was found half dead the other night in the menagerie where, broke and homeless, she had been imprudent enough to seek shelter.
Her advice to them was to expatriate and seek a better life elsewhere:
Focus your energy on creating for yourselves a position worthy of your efforts in a more hospitable corner of the world. in those far-away lands where the national flag has been flying but for a short time and where the French woman who brings with her some of the charm of the motherland is sure to live and to live well.
For in the colony she could be sure to find a husband in no time. Rather than having to struggle alone in this exacting world, the possibility ‘to marry well with good colonists’, Corneau advised, ‘is not the worst imaginable outcome’ for these women.31 Even the Parisian feminist daily, La Fronde, showed enough interest in female colonial emigration to run a number of articles on the subject. ‘Trop de femmes’ (Too many women) by the Belle Epoque writer Marcelle Tinayre introduced the problem of ‘excess’ single women in the
British Isles and proposed emigration as a solution that would apply to both the British and French contexts:
Let’s further the emigration of English women, and even of French women who do not find a living in their country; may we secure for them honorable means to earn a living in the colonies. In Madagascar, Tonkin and Cochin-China there is an abundance of functionaries and colonists ready to become husbands.32
Two months later, La Fronde featured a report on the views of four female readers on women’s willingness to marry off to the colonies. All four interviewees unanimously agreed that Frenchwomen from good families would have no hesitation to follow the men they loved, no matter where.33