No Place for a Woman: Gwelo Town, Southern Rhodesia, 1894-1920

Abstract

This paper asks why it is so difficult to research the lives and experiences of urban women in Gwelo, an industrial town in Southern Rhodesia. It used to be said that African migrant workers in urban areas and mine compounds were predominantly male, and that women were left behind, unwaged, as an invisible 'rural subsidy' on migrant wages. The evidence from the first few decades of white occupation supported this interpretation. However, historians today acknowledge the presence of women in towns and on mine compounds from an early stage of white occupation and urbanization. Given the paucity of evidence, is this simply a reflection of feminist political correctness? Were women only present in such insignificant numbers as to have left little trace? Or is it rather something about towns which makes it harder to see women in the historical record? This paper demonstrates that there is evidence that women played an active role in the development of the new town. African women appear in court records and in the memories of old people. White women appear occasionally in newspapers, in old photographs and reminiscences, and again, in court records. They were there and probably reasonably visible to the eye; but they have a very low profile in the archival record. The paper draws two conclusions: first, that white women's experiences were obscured in the record because the reality of their experiences was at odds with the icon of a rural 'white womanhood' which was important for early white nation-building; and second, that African women's presence in town was obscured by African men claiming urban public spaces as 'male space'. Although women were there, they were not acknowledged as part of the urban environment and so we find it hard to see them now.