Content area
Waiting for these women did not mean sitting in stasis, but instead encompassed a range of activities, including developing social networks; entrepreneurial activities; secking lodging, passage, and employment; and using appeals to both emotion and the law to seek aid and to advocate for their rights. Traveling ayahs were familiar figures in the British imperial world, appearing in illustrations of British Indian life, as characters in children's books, and in the many newspaper advertisements for their services published in Britain and India. A twelve-year-old ayah named Suzanne took control of her options when she chose to remain at the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, where she had created a sense of community, rather than return immediately to Burma and her family.