Gender, Colonial 'Women's History' and the Construction of Social Distance: Middle-Class British Women in Later Nineteenth-Century South Africa

Abstract

In recent years, two streams of feminist historiography ‐ one emerging in South Africa, the other arising from an examination of European colonialism in general ‐ have converged to create a balanced and subtle conceptual scheme within which to consider women's roles in the social world of colonial South Africa. This work identifies and avoids the inaccuracies which result from writing of women in the colonial period as though they were 'people of gender', enclosed within a 'separate sphere' created by patriarchy. Recent empirical work on settler women in South Africa, inspired by these historiographical advances, has started to provide a much more rounded view of settler women's attitudes, experiences and social roles than had hitherto existed. It is, however, possible to identify an important continuity of approach between earlier and more recent historiographical generations. This continuity pertains to the importance of the concept of 'social distance' in thinking about European women's experience and social impact in colonies. The article attempts to show that an approach centred on the concept of 'social distance', suitably adapted in light of recent advances, has major advantages: It is both gender-sensitive and gender-neutral, it is empirically well-supported and it enables clear connections to be established between women's experience and the construction of colonial society as a whole.