Afrikaner Women Research Articles

Radikaal versus beskeie: Die vroegste vrouestemme teen patriargie in die Suid-Afrikaanse literatuursisteem

This article explores similar social experiences of South Africa in the English and Afrikaans literary systems respectively. It investigates the reflection of patriarchy as an ideological presupposition of South African society in the earliest writings of two South African writers, Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and Maria Elizabeth Rothmann (1875-1975) (known as M. E. R.). In doing this, it offers a discussion of how these women's involvement in South African politics sought to address the situation that political rule during the late 1800s and early 1900s created for South African women in the broader context of the South African War. The practice of gender politics as a response to these social experiences is discussed, while the contribution of Schreiner's radical voice to the stereotyping of the Afrikaner woman is compared to the modest voice with which M. E. R. fought for the rights of these stereotyped women. The article concludes that the nature of, and similarities and differences between their feminist voices determined Schreiner's and M. E. R.'s contribution to their respective literary systems, as well as their contribution to English and Afrikaans prose.

God, vertroue en twyfel: Die vroue in die konsentrasiekampe tydens die Anglo-Boereoorlog

God, trust and doubt: The women in the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer or South African War.Many books and articles have been written on the religious concept of the Afrikaner women who suffered in and survived the concentration camps during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa. It seems as if nothing has been written, though, on their image and understanding of God. This article is an attempt to close the gap in the research. These women’s understanding of God was mainly shaped by the Old Testament. They saw the two Boer republics as the new people of God, elected to exist in freedom, as independent states. To them, God was the God of justice and righteousness, who will defend his chosen people from oppression. The defeat on the battlefield caused a crisis of faith among many women. The war diary of Johanna Brandt (née Van Warmelo) offers useful information about the women’s faith and the shattering of their faith. In the second part of this article, Lutheran perspectives on the God of the Bible and man-made idols are provided as a Christian alternative to the faith of our forefathers. The Psalms and the prophets are also revisited to point out the presence of God, as well as the ethical consequences of the Jewish-Christian religion.Contribution: This is probably one of the first articles written on women’s understanding of God, women who were confined to the concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. The main emphasis falls on Johanna Brandt (née Van Warmelo), who was an assistant nurse in the Irene camp, on the outskirts of Pretoria. She formulated her and the other women’s belief in the God of justice. Their understanding of God motivated them to endure the hardships and thousands of deaths in the camps.

Between Transnational Socialism and White Privilege: Afrikaner Woman Worker’s ‘Library’ in the 1930s and 1940s

ABSTRACT In this article, I set out to introduce the Garment Workers Union (GWU) prose as a neglected part of Afrikaans-language literature. I offer an overview of texts written or translated by the GWU members and published in the official trade union organ Die Klerewerker/The Garment Worker. The presented workers’ reading list is divided into original Afrikaans writings and translations from English into Afrikaans. All these texts offered the newly created white working class a new identification, manoeuvring between belonging to the national imagined community of Afrikaners based on the concept of nation and whiteness, and to a transnational workers’ community based on the category of class. Looking at the impact of the Dutch and English language traditions in South Africa, I propose that the way in which European conventions made their way to Afrikaans literature, was class-based. Textsrecognized as artistic, incorporated in the Afrikaans literary canon, drew heavily on Dutch tradition. The English language turned out to be the medium that also circulated a less elitist thought. Therefore, it was English that enabled the movement of texts from Europe and the United States to South Africa that shaped the South African white working-class, including its Afrikaner part.

Natal Afrikaner women and the South African War (1899-1902)

Natal Afrikaner women and the South African War (1899-1902)

Afrikaner nationalism and the light side of the colonial/modern gender system: understanding white patriarchy as colonial race technology

There is a growing body of feminist scholarship and literature exploring the ways in which Western patriarchal technologies of gender differentiation and sexual violence structure the racial categorisation and dehumanisation that define South Africa’s history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. In this article, I consider the gendered history of white Afrikaner nationalism in the context of these insights. Using the decolonial feminist lens of María Lugones, I interpret the historical and contemporary patriarchal subjugation of the white Afrikaner woman as a site of the production and maintenance of colonial racial categories and hierarchies. Gaining a better understanding of how gender operated as a colonial mode of organisation in the process of forging the ethno-racialised white identity of the Afrikaner in the early nineteenth century in opposition to the black indigenous majority population helps to explain how the continued patriarchal subjugation of white Afrikaner women by Afrikaner men in postcolonial/postapartheid South Africa works to reassert and maintain colonial racial categories and inequalities that continue to plague the country.

MT Steyn: ’n Moderne Christen-Afrikanerleier?

Die waardering vir president MT Steyn onder sy mense het weerklink in beskrywings waarmee hulle hom gekarakteriseer het, soos "Afrikaner van die Afrikaners" en "siel van die Vryheidstryd". Steyn (1896-1902) was die laaste president van die Republiek van die Oranje-Vrystaat, maar die eerste een wat in dié onafhanklike Boererepubliek gebore is. Omstanders kon sy belydenis van God Drie-enig as die Driemaal Heilige God uit sy eie mond hoor. Hy het sy taak, waaronder die Vrystaat se deelname aan die Anglo-Boereoorlog, in die geloof aangepak. Sy reaksie op probleme was gegrond op Christelike lewenswaarhede. Hoewel hy soms in onpersoonlike, onsydige terme na God verwys het, sou dit hom nie verhinder om die Bybel as gids vir die lewe te aanvaar nie. Vanuit sy agtergrond as 'n Vrystaatse boerseun sou Steyn 'n spontane band met die Afrikaner en veral die Vrystaatse Afrikaner ontwikkel. Deur studie en opleiding as 'n Afrikaner uit Afrika in Nederland en Brittanje, asook deur sy vriendskap met bekende Engelse van Bloemfontein en sy werk as 'n Vrystaatse regter, sou Steyn ontwikkel in 'n moderne, belese en berese staatsman. Hierdie Vrystaatse president het gedurende sy ampstydperk (1896-1902) getoon dat hy deeglik op hoogte was van Suid-Afrikaanse en Westerse denkrigtings en dat hy sy eie posisie as Vrystater in hierdie opsig na binne en buite kon verantwoord. Steyn se optrede as president op nasionale sowel as internasionale vlak is deurgaans gerig deur die beginsel van reg en geregtigheid. Hy was uitgesproke Afrikaans, maar met lewensruimte vir ander groepe. Daarby was hy 'n voorstander van die strukturele gelykwaardigheid van state, ongeag hulle mag of vermoë. Steyn se sentrale lewenskompas is op die Vrouemonument aangebring: "Uw wil geschiede …".

Discourses of transnational feminism in Marie du Toit’s Vrou en feminist (1921)

In this article I investigate transtextuality in Vrou en feminist (Woman and Feminist, 1921) by Marie du Toit in order to demonstrate how she grafted first-wave transnational feminism onto the Afrikaans context. Du Toit’s book is approached as a space of contact between progressive European and North American thought and a South African, particularly Afrikaner, mindset. Du Toit relied on a multiplicity of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discourses to support her argument that Afrikaner women become part of the feminist movement. Due to the numerous quotations from scientific papers and literary fiction, mostly English but also Dutch, her book can be described as a heteroglot text. Utilizing the histoire croisée approach, I discuss Du Toit’s text on the macro and micro scale: I locate it in a historical perspective as a literary document and focus on the ways in which diverse voices intersect and converse with one another. I argue that the book was an unsuccessful attempt at inviting the Afrikaans reader into a transnational imagined community of suffragettes because of prejudice against the English language and culture. English sources, which Du Toit extensively quoted, deterred potential Afrikaans supporters, and consequently prevented transfer of feminist thought. Even though she also supported her views with some texts in Dutch in wanting to appeal to her reader’s associations with a more familiar Dutch culture, this tactic was insufficient to tip the balance.

‘The piety of Afrikaner women’: In conversation with Prof. Christina Landman on the piety of Afrikaner women

In conversation with Prof. Christina Landman’s analysis of the piety of Afrikaner women, this article explores the role patriarchy and misogyny played in subduing and silencing Afrikaner women from revolting against their male counterparts in the midst of male domination in the 19th and 20th centuries in South Africa. It asks questions around whether or not concluding that Afrikaner women remained silent and accepted male domination because of their conservative religious beliefs is oversimplification. This article further attempts to offer a deeper version of why white Afrikaner women did not protest against the patriarchal system that denied them their full humanity and freedom. The study starts by proposing a theoretical framework within which research on the subject of the Afrikanerdom’s and the Calvinism Reformed Churches’ treatment of women evolved, all the while in conversation with Prof. Landman on her thesis that Afrikaner women’s silence in patriarchal hegemony was a result of conservative Calvinism and sin–soul–salvation piety.

Against Ordentlikheid: Disobedient Femininities in Selected Embroideries by Hannalie Taute

ABSTRACTThis article explores the art practice of Hannalie Taute vis-à-vis the discourses of ordentlikheid (respectability) and the volksmoeder (mother of the nation). I begin by offering theoretical frameworks for these discursive structures, as well as a selective historical trajectory of their development, with major emphasis on Afrikaner femininity and Afrikaner women's domestic labour. Through a reading of selected embroidered works by Taute, I speculate on the degree to which the artist revisits and subverts particular narratives of Afrikaner ethnic identity and “women's work” to imagine new modes of feminine expression that challenge the rigid conventions of ordentlikheid and the volksmoeder. My analysis of Taute's embroidery is informed by the concept of radical decadence, which provides a theoretical paradigm for making sense of the strategic use of excess, pleasure, and the taboo in the practices of contemporary women artists working with craft materials. The works were thus selected for their materiality and thematics, which I argue appropriate archaic signifiers of Afrikaner femininity to produce irreverent counter-narratives that resist the policing of female sexuality and other forms of patriarchal subjugation.

I AM AN AFRIKANER WOMAN

DISLOCATING WOMENIn the run up to the first truly democratic elections in South Africa, the Afrikaner women issued a heartfelt cry: What have you done in our name? Did Black women understand the question? Twenty years later, many a black-black woman, “Bantu” in the terminology of yesteryear, have begun to feel the anguish of their Afrikaner Sisters. Indeed, I am become the Afrikaner woman of yesteryear - Guilty by Association.The lesson? Power disempowers women and yet, in the final analysis, we are all held accountable for the ills of society. In essence, there is no ‘other’September 7, 2015

Integrating Afrikaner women's history in senior secondary school CAPS through an evaluation of women's "sense of independence"

Integrating Afrikaner women's history in senior secondary school CAPS through an evaluation of women's "sense of independence"

Buiten de literaire canon: Literatuur van vrouwen uit de arbeidersklasse en modernisering van Zuid-Afrika in de eerste helft van de 20e eeuw

This article focuses on literary texts published in the Klerewerker/Garment Worker , the periodical of the Garment Workers’ Union. The GWU which was an organisation consisting mainly of Afrikaner female workers, was established in 1930 in Johannesburg, against the background of economic and social changes in South Africa, which can be collectively described as modernisation. It is argued that the Klerewerker/Garment Worker, while striving to spread the ideology of socialism amongst working class women, has created — by modifying the Volksmoeder [Mother of the Nation] ideal rooted in the Afrikaner nationalist tradition — a modern model of femininity. Moreover, the literary forms employed in the periodical constituted a parallel line to the development of the canonical literature in Afrikaans, even though they were discredited by critics as socialist propaganda. In the analysis of selected short stories and dialogues written by GWU activists the focus is placed on recurring motifs and literary conventions applied by the authors and aims they tried to achieve. It is concluded that these texts can be viewed as a counter-discourse to the dominant unifying attempts in the Afrikaans literature created in the 1930s and 1940s. The discussed instances of working class literature, free of limitations imposed by the dominant middle class literary taste, can be viewed as a form which temporarily offered a relative independence of expression to the Afrikaner women. Furthermore, these texts give an insight into how movements foreign to the canonical literature of the period, such as socialism and feminism, were present in the cultural and social debate.

Heimat in the Veld?

By the end of the twentieth century, most descendants of the Berlin missionaries in South Africa had become integrated into Afrikaans-speaking white society to the extent that they could "pass" as Afrikaners, many of them also selfidentifying as such. The complex undertones of German-South African identity become apparent when looking into early twentieth century projects run by missionaries and their sons with the aim of ingratiating themselves with the Afrikaner establishment as "twin souls" - German-Afrikaners. This article makes use of Afrikaans and German popular magazines, and German-South African works of fiction (short stories as well as novels), not in the first instance for their literary quality, but rather for the extent towhich these media served as performative spaces in which German-South African men could act out their various social roles and contemplate the convergence between different identities assumed for different occasions. Particular attention is paid to the "backstage" of female domesticity, and how the construction of the ideal German Hausfrau continued to anchor male "occasionalism" well into the twentieth century, until this sublimated figure became too problematic when seen in the context of other local possibilities, often embodied by Afrikaner women.

Untold History with a Historiography: A Review of Scholarship on Afrikaner Women in South African History

In ‘The Rise and Fall of Afrikaner Women’ (2003), Gilliomee argues that Afrikaner women's history ‘is the biggest untold story of the Afrikaner people’, and in doing so ignores the research on Afrikaner women's history. This ignoring of women's history may be attributed either to orthodoxy in historical writing or the lack of a review on women's history despite a relatively large body of work, focussing in particular on Afrikaner women. Although contributions to women's history come out of a wide range of disciplines, including literary theory, political science, anthropology and history proper, it is my contention that there is a definable trend developing in South African historiography which particularly represents the history of Afrikaner women. This article explicitly shows that the history of Afrikaner women is not untold through a review of the contributions of scholars whose work form part of (what I call) the historiography of Afrikaner women. This article not only contextualises Afrikaner women's history against the backdrop of tendencies in historical writing but also focuses on the major themes in the historiography of Afrikaner women, including identity, political agency, labour, welfare, class, reproduction and particularly the ongoing debate of the ‘volksmoeder’.

‘Mother of the nation’: rugby, nationalism and the role of women in South Africa's Afrikaner society

This study investigates the role of women in Afrikaner society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how it came to form an integral part of emergent Afrikaner nationalism within South Africa. Created by men and sustained through the male-dominated realms of politics and rugby, the notion of Volksmoeder or ‘Mother of the Nation’ promoted the virtues of ‘ideal womanhood’ and became a central unifying force within Afrikanerdom in the years following the Anglo-Boer War. Although the concept of the Volksmoeder defies precise definition, it nevertheless incorporated a clear role model for Afrikaner women and became part and parcel of the Afrikaner nationalist mythology that incorporated masculinized sport as part of its doctrine. On the basis of the exploits of Voortrekker women and those who had suffered at the hands of the British during the 1899–1902 conflict, this study explores the notion of an ‘idealized womanhood’ and how it was woven into a male-dominated nationalism.

Party politics jeopardised the credibility of the Women’s National Coalition for Afrikaner women in the organisation

Die Women’s National Coalition (WNC) is in 1992 amptelik gestig en was ‘n inisiatief van die African National Congress Women’s League. Die doelwitte van die WNC was om inligting oor vroue se behoeftes en aspirasies in te samel en dit in ‘n Vrouehandves saam te vat wat uiteindelik ‘n integrale deel van die nuwe Grondwet van Suid-Afrika sou word. Vanweë talle praktiese probleme, asook haar gebrek aan politieke vernuf, het die Afrikanervrou moeilik by die WNC aangepas. Daarby het die vyandigheid van swart vroue wat die vergaderings van die WNC domineer het, verder die Afrikanervrou se betrokkenheid in die wiele gery. In hierdie artikel val die soeklig op hoe die politieke gebeure tydens die onderhandelings vir ’n nuwe demokratiese bestel die WNC en Afrikanervroue beïnvloed het.

Nationalism, gender and sexuality in the autobiographical writing of two Afrikaner women

This article makes the point that autobiography, a genre often considered marginal to the literary canon, can be regarded as a site for examining the impact of nationalism on the construction of gendered and sexual identity. It investigates questions of nationalism, gender and sexuality in the autobiographical texts of Petronella van Heerden and Elsa Joubert. Petronella van Heerden (1887–1975) became the first Afrikaner woman to qualify as a medical doctor and published two short autobiographical texts, Kerssnuitsels (‘Candle Snuffings’) and Die sestiende koppie (‘the Sixteenth Cup’), in the early 1960s. Elsa Joubert (1922–) established herself as one of the most important novelists in Afrikaans literature and published the first part of her autobiography, titled ’n Wonderlike geweld (‘A Wonderful Violence’), in 2005. The article argues that van Heerden’s omission of overt references to her lesbianism can be attributed to the strong, though embattled, position of Afrikaner nationalism at the time her texts were published. With regard to Joubert’s autobiography, the article makes the point that the text demonstrates the erotic appeal of the nationalist spectacle, constituted by events surrounding the Second Trek in 1938.

The Influence of the Patrivalent Nature of the White Afrikaner Culture on the Psychological Development of White Afrikaner Women in South Africa

The Influence of the Patrivalent Nature of the White Afrikaner Culture on the Psychological Development of White Afrikaner Women in South Africa

‘Motherhood and Otherhood’ – gendered citizenship and Afrikaner women in the South African 1914 Rebellion

(2007). ‘Motherhood and Otherhood’ – gendered citizenship and Afrikaner women in the South African 1914 Rebellion. African Historical Review: Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 41-57.

Sterke vrouwen! De institutionele positie van de eerste Afrikaanse schrijfsters

Strong women! The institutional position of the first women writers in Afrikaans In the early 1990s several Afrikaans literary scholars suggested that the work of the first Afrikaans women writers had been marginalised, because it supposedly went against the hegemonic Afrikaner-nationalist discourse. Since then research in the field of social history has indicated that during the first half of the 20th century, Afrikaner women were not as powerless as has often been assumed. In this article, the biographical details of women writers from 1902-1930 are provided, with special reference to their involvement in Afrikaans women’s organisations. The short story “Prente” (“Pictures”) by Mabel Jansen is used to illustrate the interrelatedness of literature and social work within the framework of this type of organisations. In the concluding paragraph an attempt is made to explain the marginalisation of these women writers’ work from an international perspective, with special reference to the interference between the Dutch and the Afrikaans literary systems.