"More Romance than Reality": Mary Carpenter, 'Native Gentlemen,' and the National Indian Association, 1830-1880

This dissertation explores how native gentlemanliness, a specific category of colonial masculinity, allowed Indian men to partner with British women to reform women’s education in the highly racially segregated British Empire. This study tracks the beginning of native gentlemanliness, its deployment by Mary Carpenter, and the ways elite male Indian social reformers became native gentlemen to gain social capital, imperial prestige, and imperial funding for their education reforms. In doing so, it investigates the ways race, gender, and class all influenced who could participate, and ultimately control, the practice and ideology of imperial gender reform.