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BLANKENBACH (Blankenback), ELISE (Elizabeth) (Koerber, Baroness von Koerber), immigration agent and reformer; b. c. 1839 in the Grand Duchy of Baden (Germany), daughter of Johann Blankenbach and Maria ———; m. 26 Jan. 1860 William von Koerber, Baron von Koerber (d. 1872), 18 years her senior, in Cobourg, Upper Canada, and they had four daughters, two of whom died young, and two sons; d. 7 April 1884 in London, England.

Early years in Canada

Elise Blankenbach immigrated from the Grand Duchy of Baden to Upper Canada around 1856. It was perhaps this experience – “I have seen things & people that made me shudder,” she would say in 1874 – that led to her career in immigration work and her interest especially in immigration reform for the benefit of women travelling alone. In 1860 she married a former engineering officer in the Austrian army who had immigrated in the early 1850s and found employment as a draftsman in the Province of Canada’s Crown Lands Department. The couple lived first in Ottawa and then in Quebec City. Apparently they played something of a role in Quebec society, being presented to Prince Arthur* when he visited in 1869.

Career in immigration

Left without adequate savings after her husband’s death in April 1872, Elise Koerber was obliged to provide for her family. Her first thought was to establish a school for young women in Vienna, offering Canadian girls a chance to study abroad. Around the same time, however, an opportunity arose to pursue immigration work in the federal government of Sir John A. Macdonald*. The Department of Agriculture had been responsible for such matters since the 1860s [see Alexander Carlisle Buchanan*], and Koerber was paid a commission for each immigrant she recruited. Her desire for employment derived from legitimate financial need, but she also felt a vocation. “I had to do this work,” she would remark in 1879. “It came to me as a mission. My previous life and aspirations seemed a preparation and an education for it.” With great self-confidence and vigour, she promoted her ideas on immigration both to governments and to the general public, disregarding prevailing expectations that a woman’s role should be confined to the domestic sphere: “To those who find it preposterous, perhaps, that a woman should dabble in such public matters, I reply, that nature is fickle sometimes in the distribution of her gifts and talents.” She also insisted that she deserved reward for her skills.

In 1872, accompanied by her four children, Koerber left Canada with instructions from John Henry Pope, the minister of agriculture, to circulate advertisements for prospective immigrants in Switzerland, the Tyrol (Austria/Italy), and the German regions of Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, and Saxony. Her work in Germany was, however, hampered by a law that forbade foreigners from encouraging emigration. Having left for Canada prior to German unification in 1871, she had no claim to citizenship. Only after she turned from general emigration to female emigration, the promotion of which was seen as a form of philanthropy in reducing what Koerber referred to as a “superabundance” of women, was she welcome to work in Germany. In Europe she travelled without adequate reimbursement from the Department of Agriculture. It would not be until late 1874, when Luc Letellier de Saint-Just was minister, that she received the official title of special immigration agent.

Koerber found a sympathetic supporter in John Lowe*, the departmental secretary, who saw her as “a perfectly respectable woman … honestly struggling against odds” and who advocated for her to receive fair compensation. Eventually, in 1877, through her own tenacity, she received a salary equal to that of male agents. Her income, however, never fully offset the expense that her constant travelling involved. The whereabouts of her children during these travels is unclear. In an 1875 letter protesting the refusal of Ontario’s Department of Immigration, which also supported her work, to provide an additional grant, she found it “astonishing that I have never yet been asked whether it was possible for me to live with my children.”

Koerber’s personal project was to establish a colony of Swiss settlers in Ontario. In June 1873 she had accompanied “some families and a few girls” from Switzerland to Canada in an attempt to attract interest in the endeavour. She gained the attention of Archibald McKellar*, the Ontario commissioner of agriculture and public works, then responsible for immigration, and asked him for a suitable location. Of the three suggested sites, she chose the southeast shore of Lake Nipissing, an area of about 200 square miles. She persuaded Dr Jacques Kaderly, a Swiss mineralogy professor who was visiting Toronto, to conduct a study of the region. After Kaderly produced an encouraging report, which was published and circulated abroad, a few Swiss arrived. Koerber travelled to the Nipissing region herself to verify Kaderly’s conclusions in June 1874. She then went back to Germany, where she received a message from the Ontario government informing her that the Swiss had abandoned the colony (driven out, to her disgust, by black flies). Undeterred, she continued to advertise Ontario as a destination for Swiss migrants, by posting notices and giving public lectures. She also continued to petition the federal Department of Agriculture to provide for Swiss immigrants in need of transportation and supplies. Meanwhile, she launched a similar project for a colony of French-speaking Tyrolean immigrants in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Through a connection with the Swiss president, Friedrich Emil Welti, Koerber promoted settlement in Canada during a conference on emigration in Bern on 4 Oct. 1876. In 1879 she would claim to have brought over “between two and three thousand people altogether.”

Special interest in female immigration

While inducing settlers to come to Canada, Koerber pursued her ambition of improving the immigration system for the benefit of single women. In 1874 she first proposed a network of women-led committees that would, like the Red Cross, be international in scope but also alive to national and local interests. These committees would coordinate care for unaccompanied female migrants and provide work opportunities in receiving countries. In an appeal to German women that year she asked, “Why depreciate female emigration, why not rather protect it, and as the means of doing so, introduce a system which will bring it altogether under the influence of women.” Such a system would disempower steamship agents, whom she called “generally the most unprincipled people you can meet.” She accused them of misleading prospective immigrants with inaccurate information, suggesting that they had no concern for people and were interested only in earning commissions. A women-organized immigration system would also ensure moral safeguards for women on ships and at their destinations. Many young female immigrants were, she argued in 1875, induced to leave their countries “by worthless characters, who lead them to destruction.” Sexual exploitation existed “to a terrible extent.”

Koerber developed a detailed proposal for a protective system which included ships that would carry only women and children, the placement of matrons as protectors and advisers aboard every vessel, and the establishment in receiving countries of women’s committees that would help immigrants to find work. The concept was attractive in Canada, where female domestic servants were in demand, and in Germany and Switzerland, where there was public concern over a surplus population of women. In 1877 her ideas were adopted by the Lette Association, a Berlin-based society for the technical education of women, which was patronized by Victoria, the crown princess of Germany. On 15 Dec. 1878 the central committee of the Patriotic Women’s Association, of which Empress Augusta was president, convened in Berlin to discuss Koerber’s ideas. Her schemes also gained the support of Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross.

In Canada, John Stoughton Dennis, the deputy minister of the interior, also became interested in Koerber’s proposals. At a meeting in Ottawa on 9 April 1879 he proposed the creation of three privately funded committees of women to aid in female immigration, in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. The central body in the capital was immediately formed with Mary Ann Scott, wife of Senator Richard William Scott*, as president. Following this success, however, Koerber lost her position with the Department of Agriculture in a general reduction of staff. She nevertheless carried on with her scheme, soliciting support for the Toronto and Montreal committees and planning to expand her work to New York. She then fell upon difficult times; she requested compensation from the Canadian and Ontario governments for past services and sought reappointment as a federal immigration agent. Her attempts to regain her position were unsuccessful, foundering perhaps on her demands for more authority and better “pecuniary conditions.” She worked briefly with the Women’s Emigration Society in London, England, but never recovered from her dismissal.

Suicide

Lacking any means of livelihood and dependent upon friends, Koerber committed suicide on 7 April 1884. (She had struggled in the past with what she called “brain fever,” brought on by “too great mental and bodily exertions,” anxiety over opposition to her work, and “private troubles,” and she may have been prone to depression; certainly she had kept up an exhausting pace.) She was found at the bottom of a staircase in a London hotel, having apparently thrown herself over the banister and fallen more than 40 feet. A few days earlier, according to the Times, she had written a letter to one of her daughters, which said, “Let me bid you farewell before I seek eternity. My last anchor of hope is gone.” An inquest delivered a verdict of suicide while temporarily insane. Her body was interred in England, with funds for the burial provided by the Canadian Department of Agriculture.

Koerber was one of the first female employees of the Canadian state. By sheer effort and determination she had represented Canada’s interests abroad and tenaciously advocated for her projects with the Canadian public and with members of parliament. The federal government came to recognize the need for bureaucratic oversight of female immigration, and in 1883 it set up in Quebec City, the major point of entry, a separate department for the reception of single women (and children) under a female supervisor. Although Koerber’s own immigration schemes involving immigrants from continental Europe were ultimately unsuccessful, she had a significant, if brief, impact on Canada’s immigration system and its relations abroad.

Christopher Long