‘The crying need of South Africa’: the emigration of single British women to the Transvaal, 1901–10

Abstract

Historical studies of the role of white women in South Africa are few. Leave aside the biographical and the anecdotal and what remains is an extremely limited literature. 1 The incipient 'women's history' has revealed important glimpses of the changing lives of African women and their political organization but may be, perhaps understandably, reluctant to grapple with the contribution of white women to the consolidation of 'white supremacy' in South Africa. These women are conspicuously privileged by conventional material standards. Nevertheless, white women are largely absent from South African political platforms, a lower proportion of European women undertake paid employment than is the case in Britain, for example, and housework is often consigned to paid black domestic labour. White women in South Africa make a restricted contribution to the economy and perform a peculiarly nebulous role in political life, and even in the home, except as the socially-accomplished icons of a patriarchal, as well as racist and colonialist, social order. We would stress that white women have 'acted' as well as being 'acted on', but the distinctive geometry of race and class in South Africa and the cultural impact of patriarchal, colonialist ideology have fashioned the parameters of their action to a large degree. Perhaps most crucially, the imperatives of white racism offered white women some mitigation of their oppression as women. Between 1901 and 1910, over four thousand single women left Britain for South Africa by assisted and 'protected' emigration through the medium of the major