The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism: Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904-1929

Abstract

Women have most often been identified as consumers rather than producers of Afrikaner culture and are seen as confined to the (albeit politicised) domestic sphere. The few historians who present Afrikaner women as asserting their presence in the domain of politics and as active in the construction of Afrikaner nationalist discourse have focused on the regendering of nationalism during the South African War, on the construction of volksmoeder discourse by middle-class Afrikaner women during the 1920s and on the politics of leading women in the Garment Workers' Union during the 1930s. In the first two decades of the twentieth century - so crucial for the formation of Afrikaner nationalism - women were seemingly acquiescent supporters of a male-constructed ideology. A history of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging (Afrikaans Christian Women's Society) demonstrates the entanglement of early Afrikaner nationalism with racially circumscribed philanthropic ventures through which women located themselves in an elaborated sphere of the domestic. In the aftermath of war, Dutch-Afrikaans women targeted impoverished whites for help whilst also actively participating in the construction of racialised Afrikaner culture. Contrary to existing historiography, maternalist discourse long pre-dated the conservative 'Volksmoeder' ideology asserted by Afrikaner nationalist men in the late 1910s. ACVV leaders drew on an idealised notion of motherhood first elaborated in Dutch Reformed Church magazines during the late nineteenth century, meshing religious with nationalist identity. The first generation of ACVV women were careful to preserve the independence of their organisation and carve out a place in public whilst also signalling their support for the dominant gender order. From the 1920s, however, a second generation of nationalist women took up leadership positions in philanthropic, cultural and party-political organisations. Theirs was the female dominion of politicised ' vrouesake ' (women's issues). They embraced motherhood whilst seeking to extend their sphere of action to include active participation in formulating social policy.