Training for Citizenship: The Women's Suffrage Movement and Modernising the State in Early Twentieth‐Century South Africa

Abstract

AbstractThe Women's Enfranchisement Association of the Union of South Africa (WEAU) was founded in 1911, only a year after the declaration of the Union of South Africa. While scholars of the South African women's suffrage movement have paid particular attention to the race politics of the WEAU and its allied organisations, comparatively little scholarship has focused on white suffragists’ claims to citizenship. This article addresses this scholarly lacuna and argues that the South African women's suffrage movement's demands for citizenship were entangled with a broader project to reform and modernise the South African state. In so doing, the article explores how members of the WEAU imagined what it meant to be ‘South African’ in the 1910s and 1920s, and particularly in relation to their framing of citizenship as a tool for shoring up white supremacy in South Africa.