GENDERING SOUTH AFRICAN LIFE INTO THE 1900S

Gender, Politics & Culture

Women’s Suffrage Movement in SA

Between 1892 and 1930 - led by the WEAU (Women’s Enfranchisement Association of the Union)

Primarily a struggle waged by middle–class, white women in South Africa

Reflected significant shifts in gender ideology of white South Africans of different classes

Visible measure of change in attitudes toward women in this period: motherhood not incompatible with political equality; female virtue not about being housebound – tight controls on women’s independent standing loosened considerably.

Progress of Suffrage: Women’s Role and Nature

Continuity in fundamental assumptions about women’s role and nature

Formal political equality did NOT represent a revolution in gender relations, even in the family

Principle of supreme male authority in the household not overthrown – persistence of the underlying principles of gender organization in a time of social and economic change

Lack of commitment to any transcendant loyalty to female sex – primary identification being with own community, class and colour (English/Afrikaans split)

Origins of the Suffrage Movement

Part of the unsettling transition to industrialization – expansion of the economic role of women beyond the domestic (comprised 75% of teachers, 85% of secretaries/clerks)

Young wage earners less dependant on fathers (!)

European immigration, British influence, new class & gender ideas (between rich/poor, men/women)

Small changes in social attitudes not enough to change politics by 1890s (wage work still believed to interfere with women’s home duties)

1895-1910

Middle class Christian temperance/social reform – needed more political leverage to effect social change

Strong sense of moral duty and Christian purpose – not connected primarily to the status of women

Women’s suffrage organizations forming in the early 1900s – but marginal during and after the Anglo-Boer war until after Union in 1910 (defeated in 1907)

Women’s incorporation into the status quo (not its overthrow!)

Segregationist class and gender organizations (SALP,WEAU)

WEAU

Launched in 1911 – exclusively white, predominantly English-speaking and urban, thoroughly middle-class

Educated, middle-aged women – handful of Afrikaans women – does not link to broader non-racial struggles (e.g. pass law campaigns of 1913)

Black women viewed from perspective of charity, not sisterly solidarity

Charlotte Maxeke and other Black social workers engaged them on issue of moral values, breakdown of ‘the family’ – welfare, not politics, meeting and agreement without a challenge to minority power

Women in Black Politics

Suffrage a non-issue until after WW2!Black politics orgs with other concerns –

protecting vote of Black men in the Cape (most of whom were part of the SANNC elite)

Extension of franchise unfeasible and women’s vote not even considered (also amongt SAIO, APO)

Women campaigned vigorously around some social and economic issues e.g. municipal pass laws, beer brewing – families affected – assumed gender roles

Measured against social/economic dislocation, votes for women shrank into insignificance

Politics of Gender, Race and Class

Victory predicated on racial domination: not simply bout eventual exclusion of Black women from the vote (white women win suffrage in 1930), but part of a larger strategy of race politics

Formally non-racial, qualified franchise existed in the Cape – protected in the 1909 Constitution (2/3 majority required to amend it)

Women’s suffrage became key to undermining this aspect of the ‘Cape Liberal Tradition’

Black men = 20% of Cape electorate in 1929. After women get the vote in 1930, their numbers are reduced to <11% in the Cape and <5% nationally

Gender & Consumption in Cities

Cultural participation as a way of illuminating how women saw themselves and their new social realities and relationships

Consumption (rather than production) in a wage earning, urban context key to identifying how everyday cultural practices amongst ordinary people are gendered/gendering societies in new ways

Not explicitly political or ‘resistant’, but about a deliberate ‘self-fashioning’ – making new ways of living in cities of understanding oneself and relationships to other women & men, as well as to a larger race/class grouping

Old & New Gender Roles

The observation of new cultural and consumption practices by social reformers and others link new, urban, female consumption cultures with an apparent rejection of particular gender roles (and the making/appropriation of new ones!)

Ideals of feminine responsibility being reconfigured around aesthetic practices rather than around the role of dutiful daughter, wife, mother

Engagement with broader culture of consumption (music, movies, dress), mass media and political discourses – aspiration, desire key ways of making the ‘self’

Global linkages, local particularities

Transformations in gendered identities a part of urban, industrial life in many parts of the world – 20thC circulation of films, advertisements, magazines, commodities make these connections possible

Youth cultures – autonomy from senior kin, disposable incomes and leisure time

New ideas of what desirable forms of masculinity and femininity could be – not structured around older, rural forms of productive work or relationships

The ‘Modern Girl’

One prominent kind of gendered, urban identity influenced by new forms of desire, consumption practices

Some education, fashion stylings, choosing lovers – ‘girl’ with positive/progressive meanings in a racialized context – connotes youth and a modern aesthetic in distinction to the prevalent perjorative use of the term for Black women in SA

A contested social category, cultural performance of gender – disreputable/respectful

Race, Gender and ‘Modern Girl’ Culture

By examining representations of the ‘Modern Girl’ in newspapers etc we can consider how this new social identity became a space for negotiating and contesting new gender identities for young women

Discourse of ‘racial uplift’ – young women’s schooling, professional careers, cosmopolitan appearances

Alternative views – judged to be immoral (avoiding marriage, engaging in interracial/extra-marital sex), supposedly imitating ‘white’/ ‘coloured’/ ‘indian’ women (especially cosmetic use - highlighting phenotypic dimensions of race)

Race and Respectability

What/whom was represented by Bantu World in the 1930s? What kinds of work & class aspirations and concerns?

What were the contestations/struggles over these aspirations in South Africa?

What does respectability come to mean? How were ideas of ‘respectability’ gendered in Bantu World? How is this related to appearance?

The Politics of Feminine Beauty

Who was responsible for creating the image of urban femininity in Bantu World? Why/What was this an attempt to distinguish?

What were the motivations behind the Bantu World beauty competition? (think about how this ties together gender & race-thinking…what does the broader political background of the time look like?)

Global phenomena of beauty contests: what forms do they take in SA? What social ideas do they represent?

How does the BW contest differ from other contests?

Modern Girl Photographs

What social and political role did portrait photography play?

How did this kind of photography change with the beauty competition? How did the ‘Modern Girl’ appear in photographs? What cultures of consumption did these appearances reflect?

Flora Ndobe – a married, cosmopolitan ‘Modern Girl’, remaking dominant cultural styles as her own

Entanglement of education, betterment, looks, consumptive practices – ambivalence about appearance/racial disrepute too…1st & last competition!

Cosmetics & Patriarchal Reassertions

Make-up met with great ambivalence – interestingly multiracial, global phenomenon amongst men policing gendered, race and class respectability

Anti-cosmetics campaign – what were the concerns?

How are relations between men and women implicated in these concerns?

Urban femininity – how was it portrayed in An African Tragedy? What did Dhlomo’s desirable model of femininity look like? What was important about this type of womanhood?