Petticoats and pickhandles: suffrage and socialism in gendered resistance to empire and mining capitalism

Abstract

abstract I recount the story of Mary Fitzgerald, a working-class Irish immigrant whose feminist and socialist identity emerge in the contest with capitalism on the Witwatersrand following the Boer War. Her life story in the early 20th Century reveals the specific nature of colonialism and mining hegemony on the Rand and the reasons for women's presence in organised working-class resistance. Hyslop (2009) has noted that white labour's confrontation in 1913 and 1914 with mining capitalism influenced other marginalised colonial subjects to challenge empire and that this was partly due to the importance of transcontinental ideas. The article turns attention to the gendered map of empire and Mary's trial on charges of public violence in 1913 to suggest that women's participation in the public sphere found impetus as much from transcontinental ideas as just grounds that the crisis of industrial health conditions on the mines posed for white working-class men and women in this period.