Octavia Hill Women Housing Managers in South Africa: femininity and urban government

Abstract

Women trained in a system of housing management developed by Octavia Hill in Victorian England were employed in South Africa's Coloured and European townships from the mid-1930s. They were also involved in training South African women in this tradition which emphasized the mutual responsibilities of landlords and tenants and rested upon the formation of trusting relationships or friendships between women housing managers and the tenants. Octavia Hill's followers worked hard to make a place for women in the field of housing management and claimed that their femininity gave them special expertise in this area, especially in terms of training housewives in domestic skills and in building up the relations of trust required by Octavia Hill's system. This paper describes the implementation of this system of management in South Africa and considers the implications of the role of women in housing management for our thinking about the gendered character of the state. My main argument is that rather than being a precedent for the value of incorporating femininity and women into the state, Octavia Hill's management tradition had already incorporated both historically masculine and historically feminine practices. In so far as she and her followers (and perhaps other female reformers) played a role in shaping the nature of the state, then it could be argued the state reflected a mediation of masculinity and femininity rather than a dominant masculinity and a subordinated or segregated femininity.