Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire

[1] In 1899, Margaret Polson Murray was in England and was swept up in the wave of patriotic support for the British Empire that followed the outbreak of the Second Boer War.

[2] On 13 January 1900, she sent telegrams to the mayors of major Canadian cities asking for their support for her fledgling organization which she called "Daughters of the Empire" that would also be "inviting the women of Australia and New Zealand to join with them in sending to the Queen an expression of our devotion to the Empire, and an Emergency War Fund, to be expended as Her Majesty shall deem fit.

[2] On 13 February 1900, 25 women attended a meeting in Montreal and agreed to form a national organization called the "Federation of the Daughters of the Empire."

After Polson Murray returned to Canada after a successful recruitment drive in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the League wrote to Polson Murray stating that they would not support the branches of the Daughters of the Empire in the United Kingdom because it would cause competition and confusion resulting in the weakening of the league and the support that both organizations could give their mutual causes.

[2] This was a genuine concern that was recognized by the South African Guild of Loyal Women who realized that conflict was not in their immediate interests.

[2][3] On her return from Britain in October 1901, Polson Murray was fatigued and ill, so she asked the ladies of Ontario – the region with the most support for the Daughters of the Empire – to assume leadership.

"[5] In addition to its explicitly imperialist mandate, the IODE aimed to foster an exclusionary sense of Canadian national identity grounded in racist assumptions current at the beginning of the twentieth century.

As Katie Pickles notes, The discriminatory practices of the IODE were not, however, confined to its propagation of the belief in a distinct, superior "British race."