The Roaring Twenties roared loudly in settler Kenya. The Happy Valley set indulged in drugs and sex, big–game hunters catered to pleasure-seeking tourists, and settlers accumulated wealth in the White Highlands at the expense of African laborers. Kenya had a reputation as an exotic playground for Europeans, an aristocratic escape from rules and responsibilities. As evoked in the memoirs of authors such as Karen Blixen, Beryl Markham, and Elspeth Huxley, this was also so for women. Britain's “most troublesome colony” offered to white women the potential for the pursuit of independence, adventure, and unconventional romance.Footnote ¹ Behind this popular image of Kenya, a less well-known story of white women in the colony also unfolded after the First World War. In 1917, Isabel Ross—an official's wife, a Quaker, and a suffragist—founded the East Africa Women's League (EAWL, or “The League”) in Nairobi. Her goal in doing so was to address “idleness among the women” and to “educate them in public affairs.”Footnote ² Its membership restricted to white women only, the EAWL's mandate was to secure the vote for white women in Kenya and, having achieved this, to “study and take action on, where necessary, all matters affecting the welfare and happiness of women and children of all races in East Africa.”Footnote ³

This article draws on the archive of the EAWL to examine the politics of colonial voluntary work as an aspect of settler society in Kenya and in relation to broader networks of imperial activism and reform.Footnote ⁴ By the 1930s the EAWL had thirteen hundred members and was an organization of considerable size and influence in Kenya. League members identified social concerns, lobbied government, sat on advisory boards, waged newspaper campaigns, and coordinated fundraising events. This voluntary activity resulted in the first maternity and children's hospitals in the colony, a children's aid society, seniors' nursing homes, daycare and nursery schools, employment and adoption agencies, and various pieces of legislation concerning child welfare, domestic servants, housing, and education. The aspiration of the League to aid women and children across colonial Kenya's divided racial communities was constrained by the limited vision of a membership rooted in the politics of settler society. This article explores the tensions inherent in this simultaneous commitment to colonial welfare and settler politics through the case of a debate in 1930 concerning Closer Union, an episode in which the League took an active role in opposing a potential transition to majority rule in Kenya.

Histories of settler Kenya have focused on the acrimonious history of settler politics concerning land, labor, and future self-government—in short, the politics of the settler “predicament” of maintaining dominance as a racial minority.Footnote ⁵ The location of white women within this terrain of settler politics has received less scholarly attention to date.Footnote ⁶ Across the British Empire, white women inscribed racial boundaries through their domestic lives, enforcing codes of conduct around servants and insisting on standards of decorum in housekeeping as part of what it meant to be white on the colonial frontier.Footnote ⁷ In their writing—novels, memoirs, and letters—white women represented and recreated this colonial experience for a metropolitan audience.Footnote ⁸ Settler women also had active public lives, some through a formal position in local politics and many more through participation in voluntary welfare organizations. In Kenya, the EAWL was founded not as a charitable agency but, according to Isabel Ross, as “a political organisation in the sense that it encouraged the public work and responsibilities of citizenship of women and their interest in the Government of their country.”Footnote ⁹ The first part of this article examines the EAWL as a key outlet for the public participation of white women in Kenya, and as contributing to the politics of white prestige through an argument for the benevolent paternalism—or in this case maternalism—of settler society.

But the EAWL cannot be understood only in the immediate context of settler society. The second part of this article therefore considers the League's engagement with contemporary networks of international women's activism directed at imperial reform. In 1930 the League extended its reach beyond Kenya into a larger sphere of imperial politics when one member, Lady Eleanor Cole, went to London as part of a settler delegation taking part in discussions about a Closer Union or federation of British territories in East Africa. At stake was the uncertain future of Kenya as a colony of either white settlement or eventual African majority rule.Footnote ¹⁰ A long-standing debate in imperial politics, the issue of Closer Union in 1930 focused on two white papers, published by the Colonial Office that same year, that, from the perspective of the settlers, threatened the future of white settlement in Kenya by promoting instead African interests as imperial priority. Cole was appointed by the League to speak on the issue in London on behalf of the “women of Kenya,” representing white women who were members of the League.Footnote ¹¹ She argued in favor of increased white settlement, and offered women's voluntary work as evidence of settler commitment to African well-being and the future development of the colony. Her efforts defended settler women as actively engaged in the duties ascribed to white women across the British Empire, and in doing so embedded the EAWL within contemporary networks of international women's activism directed at imperial reform.

Voluntary social work as an aspect of daily life for the increasing numbers of British women residing in the colonies after the First World War fits into a much longer history of philanthropy in Britain and the empire. A philanthropic role was central to the identity of imperial white womanhood, and was among the tensions of race, gender, and civilizing mission at the heart of the liberal imperial project.Footnote ¹² In their reform efforts British women challenged aspects of imperial rule and promoted what they understood as imperial welfare, while at the same time contributing to popularizing and naturalizing empire at home and building a moral justification for the extension of imperial power and knowledge. During the interwar period this imperial activism took on new forms, with British activists linked to emerging transnational feminism and international organizations agitating for colonial social welfare and, in particular, the needs of colonized women and children.Footnote ¹³ This activism contributed to debates about the nature of imperial trusteeship that were codified in the Colonial Welfare and Development Act of 1940 and enacted through the welfare imperialism of the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁴

Not confined to the metropole, British women residing in the colonies who engaged in voluntary work also participated in this imperial politics of welfare. That a voluntary welfare organization existed also at the heart of settler society challenges the idea of Kenya's aristocratic white community as exceptional within the British Empire.Footnote ¹⁵ Welfare work by white women on the colonial frontier was complicated by the politics of race and gender in the daily life of empire, and was an integral component of what Adele Perry has called the “curious politics” and ambivalent identity of settler women as “liminal or in-between subjects” of empire.Footnote ¹⁶ During the Closer Union debate in 1930 the EAWL empowered white women in Kenya to engage in imperial affairs, but in doing so the organization involved itself in a colonial politics that sought to disempower African men and women. The ways in which the EAWL wielded the language of colonial welfare in relation to both settler politics and contemporary networks of transimperial reform suggests the ways in which welfare, and ideas of imperial benevolence, were malleable and used to defend diverse political visions of the future of the British Empire.

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On 27 June 1930, a women's conference was called in Nairobi to discuss the threat to the settler community posed by recent government white papers on Closer Union and Native Policy in East Africa. These policy papers promoted “native paramountcy” rather than white settlement as the imperial priority for Kenya.Footnote ¹⁷ The meeting in response was organized by Mrs. Ailsa Turner, then president of the EAWL. As she explained in her invitation, “I feel that it is the duty of us women to do everything we possibly can to assist our fellow countrymen to obtain a solution of the question of the future of this Colony.”Footnote ¹⁸ More than seventy women attended, with half as many again sending letters to express their outrage at the white papers.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result of the conference, EAWL member Lady Eleanor Cole joined a delegation to London led by unofficial settler leader Lord Delamere. Although unanimous in their support of the male delegates, League members nevertheless appointed Cole to “bear witness for them.”Footnote ²⁰ In London, Cole would argue that settler women “are making permanent homes in Kenya, they are bringing up their children in that country with the idea that they too should make Kenya their home,” and “for this reason the women feel they are vitally concerned in the future government and development of the country.”Footnote ²¹ Turner, writing to the editor of the London-based newspaper East Africa, described all this as “quite epoch-making,” at least for settler women, because the League “sending a women on a political mission to England” was “a big step on the road of progress in the Women's World, in Africa.”Footnote ²²

The question of Closer Union concerned joining in some combination the British colonies of East and Central Africa in order to coordinate the economic and political development of the region. Federation would enable the eventual establishment of a “great white dominion,” in which political dominance would be in the hands of the settlers until such time as a multiracial state could be established.Footnote ²³ Recently, Daniel Gorman has argued that the politics of Closer Union as debated in interwar Kenya were not only a regional issue but rather “a canvas upon which successive British administrations sketched their broader colonial visions in the face of growing international influences.”Footnote ²⁴ In 1930, settler ambitions for responsible government were complicated by: business interests in East Africa, claims by the Indian community to imperial citizenship, humanitarian critics of settler policy in London, international pressures and the status of Tanganyika as a League of Nations–mandated territory, and the increasing African politicization in Kenya marked by the independent schools movement and the female circumcision controversy of 1929.Footnote ²⁵

The two white papers provoking settler response in 1930 outlined the vision of the British Labour government for the future of colonial rule in East Africa as promoted by Lord Passfield, then secretary of state for the Colonies. This plan centered on native paramountcy, a concept first addressed in the Devonshire Declaration of 1923, which prioritized African welfare, development, and eventual self-government as the responsibility of imperial rule.Footnote ²⁶ In 1931, a Joint Parliamentary Commission on the question of Closer Union was held, before which the settler delegates, including Lady Cole on behalf of the EAWL, gave testimony. When it became clear that federation of the East Africa colonies would not result in white minority rule the settlers would drop their case.Footnote ²⁷ The immediate outcome was a stalemate: Kenya as a colony of primarily white settlement or eventual African majority rule would not be definitively decided until the late 1950s.Footnote ²⁸

Settler politics in Kenya were complex and locally divisive during the interwar decades, revealing a white population that was by no means a unified group of aristocratic farmers.Footnote ²⁹ According to Brett Shadle, “the white community was so shot through with political, economic, cultural and personal conflict to make the term ‘community’ almost ironic.”Footnote ³⁰ “Yet,” Shadle continues, “in certain areas whites shared common interests and spoke with a single voice,” notably in defense of the white prestige or racial solidarity on which settler economic and political privilege rested.Footnote ³¹ This white prestige was a gendered project, concentrated on protecting the honor of white women—residing in Kenya in equal numbers with white men by the 1930s—from the threat of Black Peril, and controlling those women who transgressed sexual norms.Footnote ³² The participation of the EAWL in the Closer Union debate suggests that white women also made an active contribution to this settler politics of white prestige.

Alignment with settler political aspirations for federation fit the mandate of the EAWL because it afforded an opportunity for white settler women to speak on imperial issues and defend their own interest in the future of the colony. However, this direct association with settler politics was not uncomplicated. In 1930, a notable opponent of the settler position on Closer Union was none other than Isabel Ross, founder of the League.Footnote ³³ Ross left Nairobi in 1922 with her husband, William McGregor Ross, who had been employed in the Public Works Department in Kenya. Ross, together with former colonial medical officer in Kenya Norman Leys, was influential in humanitarian circles in London; the two men were critical in bringing firsthand evidence of settler abuses in Kenya to defend the rights of Africans in the colony and challenge the role of white settlement in a British civilizing mission.Footnote ³⁴ Isabel Ross was also an activist and campaigner for imperial reform. Teased by a friend and correspondent as being one of those people who “burn with righteous ardours, indignations, and bubble with ideas,” Ross feared from the outset that the EAWL “might just become a woman settler Society for bickering the Government!”Footnote ³⁵ In London, Ross continued to speak and write for a wide audience on issues relating to the welfare of women in Kenya, drawing on her colonial experience to argue that African women suffered more from white economic greed than from the “native customs” targeted by metropolitan activists.Footnote ³⁶ Although distancing herself during the 1930s, Ross later renewed contact with the EAWL, becoming an honorary member from London at the invitation of Lady Baden-Powell, president in 1941, and making a return visit to Kenya to speak at a conference organized by the League in 1949.Footnote ³⁷

In 1930, much of the energy behind the EAWL participation in the Closer Union debate came from Ailsa Turner, League president from 1925 to 1940, and Lady Eleanor Cole, long-standing member and president in 1946. Less is known about Turner, but Cole was a prominent figure in Kenya Colony.Footnote ³⁸ The daughter of the second earl of Balfour and niece of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, Lady Eleanor was married to Galbraith Cole, himself the younger son of the earl of Enniskillen and brother-in-law of Lord Delamere.Footnote ³⁹ Galbraith Cole was among the largest settler landowners in Kenya, and he became infamous in Britain for his involvement in displacing the Maasai and for his confessed murder of an African farm laborer and subsequent exile from the colony.Footnote ⁴⁰ On her husband's death in 1929, Lady Eleanor became sole owner of thousands of acres in the Kenyan highlands, which she managed for the next decade as an absentee landlord from the Balfour family estate in Surrey, not returning to live full time in Kenya until the 1940s.Footnote ⁴¹

As the EAWL's delegate in London, Cole defended settler women as not merely seeking a life of ease, wealth, and pleasure away from Britain, but rather negotiating daily life in Kenya Colony against considerable hardship while still making time to engage in public service. She herself was in some ways an unlikely candidate to make these arguments. While her social and political influence in London and Nairobi enabled Cole's efforts on behalf of the EAWL, her connections at the same time confirmed the image of Kenya Colony as ruled by a handful of influential aristocrats committed to the pursuit of wealth rather than African welfare, as presented by humanitarians Leys and Ross.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, the “women of Kenya” as represented by Cole and the EAWL saw no incongruity in either their position or argument. Because voluntary work was integral to settler society, they argued, settler goals of self-government could not be at odds with colonial welfare and development.

As an influential outlet for the public participation of white women, the League counted among its membership many names familiar within histories of Kenya Colony. The wives of some governors, including Lady Joan Grigg and Lady Brooke-Popham, took an active role in the League, while others, such as Lady Daphne Moore, specifically avoided any connection.Footnote ⁴³ The attendance sheet for the 1930 women's conference included prominent figures Lady Delamere and Gertrude Grogan, both of whom were the wives of settler land barons and both of whom later served terms as president of the League.Footnote ⁴⁴ The majority of attendees seem to have been British, and thus not representative of the more broadly European flavor of the settler community, and most listed their address as Nairobi—an urban bias that was a constant theme in the history of the EAWL and reflected broader settler demographics by the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁵ Ailsa Turner's invitation to the conference encouraged upcountry farmer's wives to travel into Nairobi for the meeting, and to “make every effort to sacrifice any previous arrangements you may have made and your own convenience.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Urging that “everyone is a woman of Kenya on these matters,” Turner also specifically invited the wives of colonial officials to attend the conference and share their views.Footnote ⁴⁷ Throughout its history, the EAWL sought to bridge the divide in Kenya between urban and rural, and officials and settlers, with varying degrees of success. Isabel Ross explained in her memoirs that “in the early days in Kenya, there was a tendency for sets to form. The EAWL tried to prevent ‘sets’—there was a good mixture of Government officials, missionaries & settlers & residents in Nairobi.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The League also had an unsure relationship with missionaries in Kenya. In founding the League, Ross felt that contact with missionaries would motivate settlers and officials' wives in Nairobi to take an interest in African affairs, explaining, “I felt strongly that we townswomen should learn from the best-informed women missionaries about the customs of the African women. Some of our first lectures were about these.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Under Turner's leadership, the focus of the EAWL shifted to farmer's wives and establishing upcountry branches to better incorporate isolated rural women into the organization.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1941, Turner's successor Lady Baden-Powell once again encouraged missionary women to join the League, instructing branches that “we want ALL sorts!” and forwarding a cover letter from the Bishop of Mombasa assuring missionaries that “if you can find it to be possible to associate yourself with the League and commend it as you have opportunity you will, I believe, help forward a good work.”Footnote ⁵¹ The bishop's wife, Gladys Beecher, was a long-serving and active EAWL member and a founder of the Kenyan branch of the Anglican women's welfare organization, the Mother's Union.Footnote ⁵² Although at times the EAWL was perceived as a strictly settler women's organization, many individual members straddled multiple worlds.

Membership in the League was for white women only: the question of admitting members from African and Asian communities was not discussed in a serious way until the 1950s and not enacted until Kenyan independence in 1963. A committee struck in 1960 to discuss the formal admission of non-European women reported “an almost unbroken preoccupation with the League's relations with other women over the past ten years,” explaining that “despite the recognition by Executive, demonstrated even in 1950, of the urgency of the League's admitting some sort of multi-racial membership if it were to retain its leadership in the country's affairs, rank and file support has been minimal.”Footnote ⁵³ Throughout the League's history, what “white” as a membership criteria entailed was more than skin color.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1930, Ailsa Turner forwarded a letter from a concerned EAWL member to Government House regarding the return to Kenya of the “immoral” earl of Erroll and his new wife, requesting that the League “object to people of such doubtful moral character being allowed to live in this country.” Footnote ⁵⁵ Turner felt this represented “the feelings of a very large percentage of the women of the colony in the matter.”Footnote ⁵⁶ At the other end of the class spectrum, the League also deemed poor whites undesirable. In 1944 the EAWL lobbied for the appointment of a director of social welfare to deal with cases of impoverished or otherwise deviant settlers who threatened white prestige in Kenya.Footnote ⁵⁷ A prominent concern elsewhere in colonial Africa because of the threat they posed to white prestige, poor whites remained less visible in Kenya in part as a consequence of the aristocratic reputation of the colony. As the work of Will Jackson suggests, this concealment was also the result of explicit action by the colonial government in Kenya to identify destitute whites and either provide charitable assistance through organizations such as the EAWL and League of Mercy or resort to deportation.Footnote ⁵⁸

If there was a clear division between aristocratic socialites and middle-class settlers in Kenya, as Carolyn Martin Shaw has argued, the EAWL in some ways blurred these class lines.Footnote ⁵⁹ While the League promoted supposedly middle-class virtues, prominent members moved in the same social circles as notorious socialites, and aristocrats were welcomed as leaders and among the membership. During the Closer Union episode, Cole was cognizant of Kenya's aristocratic reputation as a potential barrier to her reception in London, and she urged Turner to think about finding a replacement for her on the settler delegation, writing, “My feeling about this is that if you could have someone without a title it might make it easier.”Footnote ⁶⁰ At the League, tensions were more likely to be based on individual personality. In a small community where gossip was rife, personality conflicts and popularity contests for leadership roles were inevitable, and conflicts beginning elsewhere spilt over into the League's activities. Ailsa Turner seems to have been at the heart of such conflict, negotiating for her status as president in various voluntary organizations in the colony.Footnote ⁶¹ Personality also mattered in informing a sense of service. Women seeking independence and freedom from gender norms were unlikely to join, while women who, like Ross and Cole, felt strongly concerning the value of public service did join, regardless of the practical challenges to participation.Footnote ⁶²

The welfare work carried out by the EAWL also contributed to delineating and maintaining the boundaries of colonial society. League members claimed a voice in key health, welfare, and educational concerns through numerous standing committees and representation in municipal and colonial affairs. From its inception, the EAWL also had close ties to local politics through the Convention of Associations and Legislative Council, and it drew personal connections to political leadership in pursuit of welfare goals.Footnote ⁶³ League branches and individual members also took on a wide range of day-to-day welfare projects. In the 1935–36 Annual Report, for example, these activities were reported to include leadership of an African welfare clinic in Nakuru, prison and hospital visiting, organizing a European children's holiday party, film censorship, attendance at a conference on European and African education in the colony, teaching first-aid classes, arranging a fund for maternity expenses, and hosting tea parties for African women involving “little talks on cleanliness and general welfare.”Footnote ⁶⁴ During the interwar decades the League made repeated commitments to “native welfare work.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, most projects taken on by the organization in this period were intended to benefit the white community.Footnote ⁶⁶

The League served as a social network for white women in Kenya, emphasizing a “spirit of neighbourliness” essential to survival on the colonial frontier.Footnote ⁶⁷ As president, Ailsa Turner focused on expanding the League beyond Nairobi, connecting to other voluntary organizations, such as the Red Cross and the YWCA, and prioritizing efforts to promote European settlement and welcome newcomers to the colony in cooperation with the London-based Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women.Footnote ⁶⁸ These efforts included establishing a “Helping Hand” bureau at the League headquarters in Nairobi to assist new arrivals in securing employment and accommodation, and publishing an information booklet on life in Kenya for incoming settler wives, focusing on the importance of a correct attitude towards servants and attention to the care of children to avoid “some of the pitfalls that beset the path of European women in tropical Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In part, the attention of the League to solidarity among settler women was a response to a climate of racial fear and an effort to counteract the dangers presumed to threaten white women living in an interracial context. As Jock McCulloch argues in his analysis of Black Peril in Southern Rhodesia, the politics of white women's organizing in the colonial context, although complex, were rooted in fears concerning the insecure boundaries of race and sex in colonial society.Footnote ⁷⁰ The League was likewise a voice for white women during Kenya's Black Peril scares. The “Kijabe Outrage” of 1926, for example, generated significant correspondence from members, and prompted the EAWL to press for harsher punishment for similar crimes.Footnote ⁷¹ An ongoing concern was the protection of white children from the threat of sexual crime at the hands of domestic servants, which the League attempted to achieve through proposals for a formal training system for native ayahs (nannies) and the provision of day nurseries to reduce the time children spent in the care of servants.Footnote ⁷² Throughout the 1930s, the EAWL lobbied in support of legislation requiring domestic servants to register and carry a record of employment. The League argued that that such legislation would protect servants and provide “a definite sense of security to many women” in Kenya.Footnote ⁷³ In 1949, the Annual Report noted that owing to the demise of the official Red Book registration system, a Brown Book was being produced for the use of EAWL members as “a voluntary reference book for the safeguarding of trustworthy African employees and responsible women employers.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For the League, this relationship between servants and employers was “one of the most serious social problems in East Africa.”Footnote ⁷⁵

From its outset, the EAWL had a mandate to promote the welfare of women and children of all races in Kenya. However, what this rhetoric meant in practice was impossible to distinguish from the race relationships informing daily life in the colony. The logic of EAWL attention primarily to European welfare was based on an understanding that “the family system of the Indians in the colony, and the tribal customs of the Africans, have covered the problems that come under the heading of the welfare of women and children.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This conception of neatly divided racial communities reflected the League's privileged position as a European organization. During the 1930s, growing tensions between European settlers and African laborers in the White Highlands, and resultant policy interventions, meant worsening conditions also for African women who were affected by land alienation and labor exploitation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Increasingly politicized, these women opposed the colonial regime through collective action on issues surrounding labor and female circumcision.Footnote ⁷⁸ They also enacted what Fiona Mackenzie describes as the “sustained but less visible” dissent of “everyday forms of resistance.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Of the political protests of African women, only the issue of female circumcision elicited a direct response from the League. Positioning itself as opposed to direct government intervention against the practice, the League advocated instead gradual eradication through education and propaganda at local health centers and by European women.Footnote ⁸⁰ By encouraging its members to take responsibility for African welfare on their farms, the EAWL marshaled settler philanthropy as an alternative to political change in Kenya, intending to soften the edges and reinforce the structures of European economic and political dominance.

After the Second World War there was a considerable expansion in efforts by the colonial state to promote welfare and development in Kenya.Footnote ⁸¹ The League defined an ongoing role for itself alongside this growth of the colonial welfare state. In her 1949 Annual Report, then president Sheelagh Silvester explained that “it is clear that voluntary organizations such as the League must be prepared for years to come, to supplement the work of the few trained Government workers, and to augment the very limited funds available for social welfare of all races.”Footnote ⁸² New subcommittees were set up to study issues concerning health, education, children's aid, and social welfare; and partnerships were formed with government welfare officials.Footnote ⁸³ League members were encouraged to organize social clubs and domesticity classes for African women in partnership with colonial welfare officials as part of the Maendeleo ya Wanawake (“women's progress”) movement.Footnote ⁸⁴ Later, these official and voluntary welfare initiatives would play a role during the Mau Emergency, both as a form of rehabilitation in prison camps and as a means of influencing African women by offering social services as an incentive to being loyal to the government.Footnote ⁸⁵

The EAWL was at the heart of the European community in Kenya and served as a means by which settler women contributed to a politics of white prestige. The League could only paper over the deep cracks—social, political, and personal—dividing settler society. Nevertheless, during the Closer Union debate an emphasis was placed on the solidarity and unity of opinion of the European women of Kenya and the ability of the EAWL to speak for them as well as for African and Asian women it sought to uplift. This claim was given veracity by a shared commitment to public activity in the colony—a duty held in common between the EAWL and white women across the British Empire.

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Led by Lord Delamere, the delegation appointed to speak on behalf of the settler position in the Closer Union debate left Nairobi on 5 September 1930, embarking on the Llanstephen Castle at Mombasa, bound for Genoa, and then traveling by overnight train from Genoa to London.Footnote ⁸⁶ The delegates left with a sense that the settler community stood behind them. At a farewell dinner at the New Stanley Hotel, they had been presented with a check for £3,000 raised through the East African Standard to cover their costs.Footnote ⁸⁷ The role of the deputation was not to negotiate federation, but “to inform Home opinion of the true facts of the position in Kenya” and to enlist further support among politicians and the British public for the settler position.Footnote ⁸⁸ As Delamere wrote to his wife Gladys, the only way to ensure reliable information concerning Kenya in London was to physically be present there.Footnote ⁸⁹ Lady Eleanor Cole joined the delegation in London, having traveled ahead with her sons.Footnote ⁹⁰ In spite of her late appointment and ongoing personal commitments distracting her from the work, Cole assured Turner that Delamere and the others “have been more than nice to me and have made it clear on more than one occasion that they consider me a full and essential part of the delegation.”Footnote ⁹¹ From Nairobi, Ailsa Turner supported Cole through an enthusiastic public relations campaign—including the circulation across Britain and East and South Africa of more than three hundred copies of a published report on the initial women's conference—and by sharing news reports and Cole's letters among EAWL members in order to keep both sides informed.Footnote ⁹² “I must try and answer your long letters,” Cole wrote to Turner, “I am most grateful for them. Without them I should be completely in the dark as to what is happening in Kenya.”Footnote ⁹³

Cole's task as delegate was to make a case for the future of white rule in Kenya, and above all to “try and put the thing from the Women's point of view.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Her position was to “plead on behalf of the white women of Kenya” that

In support of this position, Cole argued that the white papers on Closer Union and Native Policy undid a history of British support for white settlement in Kenya, unfairly presenting the settlers as an immigrant community—“surely curious language for the Home Government to use in describing British Colonists in a British Colony”—and as an obstacle rather than an asset to African welfare and development.Footnote ⁹⁶ Cole clarified during questioning before the Parliamentary Commission that there was no particular aspect of the white papers that setter women objected to, rather it was the overall tone and lack of clear support for white settlers that they resented. She explained that “there seemed to be so little word of recognition of anything settlers had done out there, such a tone of suspicion as to what they were doing, or might do, that it was generally felt that there was hostility towards the Colonist out there.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This hostility from the British imperial government was understood as threatening by the white community in Kenya because it suggested that the settlers could not be trusted to consider the welfare of Africans, and that therefore their future in Kenya was not secure. Cole argued that the white papers seemed “calculated to breed discontent and suspicion between the races” and should be withdrawn “in view of the grave risks of Political Agitation and Racial Disturbance, and further in view of the necessity for not increasing the Financial burden of these Territories at the present juncture.”Footnote ⁹⁸ From the perspective of settler women in Kenya this issue was an urgent one. Depictions by the British government of the settlers as “the enemy from whom the Natives and Indians had to be protected” threatened to undermine white authority, and thus to make life unsafe for white women in the colony.Footnote ⁹⁹

When the delegates returned to Kenya in late November, Cole continued to work in London on their behalf. It was as if “Kenya had forgotten all about the White Papers,” Cole complained, as she tried to find witnesses to speak before the Joint Parliamentary Commission against Leys and Ross.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Cole's testimony before the commission was given on behalf of settler women, drew on evidence collected from EAWL members, and “ma[de] no pretensions to speak for the entire delegation,” even though Cole felt “I don't think I am likely to say anything with which they would disagree.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As she explained to Turner,

Although Cole expressed her gratitude at “the confidence shown in me by our Women's League in asking me to collaborate with the deputation” and her willingness to bring “the women's point of view” to the debate, this proved to be a rather chaotic period for her as she struggled to balance domestic and political commitments.Footnote ¹⁰³ “Everything seems to have crowded together so at the same moment, so you must forgive me if I don't get through as much League work as I should like to,” she apologized to Turner.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Cole found giving evidence before the commission to be “a most exhausting business and a fearful strain,” and she worried that her efforts to promote the perspective of settler women on Closer Union had been less than effective.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Turner disagreed, describing instead “a debt which we women of Kenya can never adequately repay.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The EAWL was convinced of the influence of a female voice in imperial politics, appointing Cole to the settler delegation “particularly in view of the number of women members in the House of Commons, and the power women were, in the affairs of State in England in these days.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This confidence, and the efforts of Cole and Turner on behalf of the EAWL in the Closer Union debate, fit this colonial voluntary organization into what was during the interwar period an expanding network of well-connected women engaged in various causes relating to imperial welfare and reform. Women as individual activists and members of large international bodies such as the League of Nations and dedicated feminist international organizations, were part of a “new internationalism” after the First World War.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This internationalism was centered in London and Geneva, rooted in emerging ideas of global community and transnational civil society, and influenced an increased popular participation in politics. In Britain, politicians from different ends of the spectrum, including the duchess of Atholl and Eleanor Rathbone, and members of influential bodies, such as Beatrice Webb and Rita Hinden at the Fabian Colonial Bureau, questioned policy making regarding colonial women and children. They lobbied persistently for information, awareness, and solutions to issues including child slavery, women's suffrage, emigration, and professional employment overseas, the trafficking of women and children, the status of indigenous women in marriage, and the question of female circumcision, to name only a few of many concerns raised.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Colonial Office files document inquiry after inquiry by individuals and organizations—the “the shrieking sisterhood” of imperial reform, according to one official—seeking information and action relating to the welfare of women and children across the British Empire.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Such activism contributed to emerging discourses of colonial social welfare and to shifting imperial practice from ad hoc voluntary efforts to professional social services and development programs following the Second World War.Footnote ¹¹¹

In the course of her work on behalf of settler women during the Closer Union debate Cole's social position and personal connections gave her entry into these circles of metropolitan activists in London. “I am sure the more people that can be met and talked with privately the better,” she wrote to Turner, arranging interviews with the duchess of Atholl, president of the National Council of Women May Ogilvie Gordon, and well-known Conservative suffragist Lady Selbourne, among others.Footnote ¹¹² Cole also had speaking engagements at meetings of the National Citizens' Union and the National Council of Women, and took membership in various organizations including the Imperial Red Cross, Overseas League, Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women, and the Associated Country Women of the World.Footnote ¹¹³ These organizations, Cole wrote to Turner, could potentially serve “as a link between British women living here & British women living in the Colonies,” and “the least they could do in answer to an appeal was to ask Govt. to give consideration to issues expressed by unanimous feeling in the Colony.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ “There is no doubt we want a representative on these kind of bodies!” she concluded.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Previously, Kenya's settler women had been noted in such circles in a less than positive light. In London, humanitarian critiques of settler abuses brought by Leys and Ross, among others, meant that white women in Kenya had come under particular fire for their failure to enact the benevolent intentions of imperial rule. In 1929, during the female circumcision controversy—in which evidence of the extent of the practice in Kenya reached parliament and generated considerable controversy regarding the need for policy intervention—settler women in the colony were directly criticized for their apparent apathy on the issue.Footnote ¹¹⁶ During debate in the House of Commons, Labor MP Colonel Josiah Wedgwood stated that beyond the “cruelty to the children” involved in the practice of female circumcision, what horrified him above all was “that this thing is tolerated, not by the House—we do not know anything about it—but by the English women living in Kenya.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Colonial secretary in Nairobi, Major Eric Dutton, in a letter alerting the EAWL to Wedgewood's statement, took this as evidence of “the apparently prevalent idea that women in East Africa do absolutely nothing for the natives, either on their farms or elsewhere.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Against this background, Cole's task on behalf of the EAWL was to rebuild the reputation of settler women as imperial citizens. Defending to a metropolitan audience “how members of their own race were living,” Cole appealed to notions of a widespread British community tied by racial whiteness and the obligations stemming from their superior civilization.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In her evidence before the Parliamentary Commission, Cole described the civilizing role of imperial women and families. “Speaking on behalf of the East African Women's League,” said Cole, “it is our firm belief that settlement—the making of homes by work on the land—the example set by the European family life—is the biggest factor working for the civilization of the Native in East Africa to-day.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Besides providing a model, Cole argued, white women extended their domestic roles through voluntarily providing food and nursing care for African families on their farms, for example during a recent period of drought in the colony. Cole went on to warn that colonial policy needed to protect and encourage white women in this role, for “if conditions are made impossible for the white woman and her family the settled estates will pass into the hands of absentee landlords with bachelor managers.”Footnote ¹²¹

As the self-appointed voice of the women of Kenya, the EAWL also shared a vision with metropolitan activists concerning the unique female perspective on imperial social concerns and the duty of white women to speak on behalf of those they saw as their colonial sisters.Footnote ¹²² As Cole claimed, “I think we, as representing the wives and mothers of the white settler community, have a right to ask Government to treat us with a less hostile spirit or to show us in what way we have failed in our task.”Footnote ¹²³ This sense of an imperial duty of white womanhood was shared. Interwar women's organizations were “convinced that the raising of the status of African women was a matter in which women in this country, who were themselves strong, free and articulate, had a duty and a responsibility.”Footnote ¹²⁴ For example, speaking as the Kenya representative at a 1925 British Commonwealth League convention in London, Isabel Ross “begged women when getting political liberty, not to forget the other races. Liberty must go beyond the boundaries of sex and race.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Gains for women in Britain entailed a duty to promote gains for women in empire. In spite of political distance, this moral imperative to act on behalf of others was part of a vision of imperial trusteeship, measured in social welfare, health and education reforms for colonial women, in which British women too had a specific role to play.Footnote ¹²⁶

Within this mutual language of imperial duty and trusteeship, local politics still mattered. While metropolitan activists envisioned far-flung imperial spaces as locations of humanitarian intervention, colonial Britons negotiated their own welfare needs together with those of the colonized. During the Closer Union debate, Cole articulated the commitment of settler women in Kenya to both colonial welfare and white prestige:

Beyond the immediate political controversy, the League saw it as its contribution to bring to discussions of colonial welfare firsthand evidence from local experience that would encourage metropolitan activists to “view the subject from a more common sense point of view.”Footnote ¹²⁸ This perspective was not always appreciated. Returning from an interview, one EAWL member reported that the duchess of Atholl, “appeared to have very little sympathy with the European women in Kenya beyond the extent of their being able to civilize and de-tribalise the Native women.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Nevertheless, this belief in the capacity of white women to better the lives of colonized women was shared. As Angela Woollacott has shown in the case of Australian feminists, the global racial politics of the interwar period contributed to the dynamics of an emerging international feminism that remained committed to the leadership responsibility of white women.Footnote ¹³⁰

Accessing the networks and language of contemporary metropolitan-based activism was more than a pragmatic choice by settler women in pursuit of parochial political ends. Through the Closer Union episode, the EAWL established connections to broader networks that would prove long lasting. In her 1933 President's Report, Ailsa Turner marveled that “as each year passes, the bonds that bind our organization strengthen,” a growth she attributed to “the forging of the chain of links that unite us in co-operation and service to our fellow woman-workers of the world.”Footnote ¹³¹ For Cole, these links ensured “a collection of friends ready to help in any informal way,” providing if not practical then at least moral support for the public activity of white women in Kenya.Footnote ¹³² A year after the initial delegation, Cole assured Turner of the success of their efforts, writing, “You would be surprised how often the League is quoted as an ideal organisation for African colonies and there is no doubt whatever it has set a wonderful example. I think its work is much more appreciated over here than in Kenya itself almost.Footnote ¹³³ Cole returned to Kenya in 1946, and a UK branch of the League formed in 1943 carried on her work in London. Although more important as a social network for prospective settlers and former colonials returning from Kenya, the UK branch also had an advisory role, for example during Colonial Office discussions concerning women's colonial voluntary work in the 1950s.Footnote ¹³⁴ Beyond London, the EAWL assisted in establishing women's organizations across British East Africa, and in 1949 initiated efforts at regional cooperation by hosting the first conference of women's organizations in East Africa.Footnote ¹³⁵

Notably, the links that lasted were those that fostered rather than challenged the League's own brand of imperial politics, focusing on promoting the bonds of a supportive British community across the distances of empire.Footnote ¹³⁶ Yet the League's transimperial networks also contributed to more expansive thinking at the organization. In her letters from London during the Closer Union episode, Cole warned Turner “It will never do for people here to think the League is wholly re-actionary & a stumbling block in the way of racial good will & we are in danger of that.”Footnote ¹³⁷ She went on to explain:

When she returned to Kenya, Cole was influential in moving the EAWL towards multiracial membership and cooperation. Although always secondary to immediate Kenyan concerns, in the next decades the efforts of the League to think, act, and connect also within a context of an international women's movement would continue.

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The Closer Union debate of 1930–31 was the final direct involvement of the EAWL in the high politics of empire. Papers relating to Closer Union make up just two files in the archive of the EAWL, quite literally buried among stacks of paper documenting a long history of volunteer work in Kenya. The enthusiasm expressed at the initial women's conference waned, and by late 1931 Turner communicated to Cole criticism of their political engagement among the League's membership. Replying from Britain, Cole agreed: “I think we must not let the League get too political. We must watch women's rights of course but otherwise—especially up country I am sure we should try & develop more on Rural Women's Institute lines.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Moving forward, the EAWL promoted an apolitical identity as essential to the task of furthering social welfare in Kenya.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ At the same time, white political control was assumed to be an essential framework for their work, and shaped later engagement with Asian and African women as participants in social welfare. As Cole articulated, “If the political question gets a firm ruling then co-operation becomes so much more possible on other lines.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The first multiracial convention of women's organizations held in Nairobi in 1957 was intended to further cooperation in women's voluntary work, and, in the context of the Mau Mau Emergency, promoted voluntarism for African women as an alternative means of nation-building and civic engagement to participation in anticolonial politics.Footnote ¹⁴²

Only the narrowest definition of political could ever exclude a colonial voluntary organization such as the EAWL.Footnote ¹⁴³ Voluntary social service activities by white women in empire were integral to the politics of daily life in empire through the construction and maintenance of race, class, and gender boundaries. The ability of settler women to speak on an imperial stage was at the same time, in the words of Adele Perry, “powerful, limited, and premised on the silence of others.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The invisibility of these politics to the EAWL effectively denied the power relationships both underpinning and in part established through their own welfare work in the colony.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Not distinct to settler society, this idea—the “comforting illusion that humanitarianism had no traffic with power,” as Susan Pedersen names it—was a feature of the transimperial feminist reform networks of the interwar decades.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

As a colonial voluntary organization, the EAWL brought to metropolitan debates about imperial welfare and development a commitment to the future of the colony as home, rather than as a distant site of humanitarian intervention. These arguments drew on rhetoric of individual responsibility for colonial welfare and the mutual entanglement of European and African economic and political development in Kenya. The paradox of this commitment to both colonial welfare and settler politics at the EAWL was the same as those of the late colonial state in Kenya. Although certainly entwined, the welfare of Africans and European settlers were not in harmony, but rather fundamentally at odds. Voluntary welfare activity was part of the “maze of contradictions” characterizing settler colonialism.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

To focus on a dichotomy between those imperial policy makers who sought to protect African welfare and settler aspirations to dominance presents Kenya's settler community as an anachronism, out of place within the twentieth-century empire. The existence and the political ties of women's voluntary welfare work in Kenya complicate this image. That the politics of the EAWL could fit in some way into a contemporary activist milieu highlights the ways in which welfare work and the rhetoric of trusteeship could, and did, serve diverse political agendas. The shift towards welfare imperialism was not a straightforward or inevitable transition, but rather an ongoing debate in which definitions of trusteeship, welfare and development, and notions of whose responsibility it was to enact such concepts, were at stake. In this, issues such as Closer Union were flashpoints revealing a diversity of thinking about the relationship between state, society, and the individual in twentieth-century empire.