A Cake of Soap: The Volksmoeder Ideology and Afrikaner Women's Campaign for the Vote

Abstract

frage campaign in South Africa. Existing women's organizations added the demand for the vote to their programs and new organizations were formed with suffrage as their exclusive goal. In 1930 legislation was finally enacted enabling white South African women to register as voters for the first time. This campaign is usually associated with the English-speaking women of the country. Cherryl Walker, for example, asserts that its leaders were not rural or Afrikaner, but characteristically middle-class, urban, and English-speaking. Walker sees Afrikaner women as firmly under the sway of the patriarchal ideology of the Dutch Reformed Church and content to exercise their power indirectly, without questioning the principle of male hegemony.I Lou-Marie Kruger finds that the issue of female suffrage was hardly ever discussed in Die Boerevrou (The Boer Woman) magazine and concludes from this that Afrikaner women played no par in the campaign.2 Marijke du Toit's work on the Afrikaner Christelike Vroue Vereniging (the Afrikaner Christian Women's Association) comes to a similar conclusion. She argues that sporadic reports of militant suffragette action in Britain made little impact in South Africa and that, for the most part, Afrikaner women agreed that unbiblical suffragettes threatened domestic life.3