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The Domesticity of AfrikanerNationalism: Volksmoeders and theACVV, 1904-1929Marijke Du Toit aa University of NatalPublished online: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Marijke Du Toit (2003) The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism:Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904-1929, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29:1, 155-176, DOI:10.1080/0305707032000060485

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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 29, Number 1, March 2003

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

MARIJKE DU TOIT

(University of Natal)

Women have most often been identified as consumers rather than producers of Afrikanerculture and are seen as confined to the (albeit politicised) domestic sphere. The fewhistorians who present Afrikaner women as asserting their presence in the domain ofpolitics and as active in the construction of Afrikaner nationalist discourse have focused onthe regendering of nationalism during the South African War, on the construction ofvolksmoeder discourse by middle-class Afrikaner women during the 1920s and on thepolitics of leading women in the Garment Workers’ Union during the 1930s. In the first twodecades of the twentieth century – so crucial for the formation of Afrikaner nationalism –women were seemingly acquiescent supporters of a male-constructed ideology. A history ofthe Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging (Afrikaans Christian Women’s Society)demonstrates the entanglement of early Afrikaner nationalism with racially circumscribedphilanthropic ventures through which women located themselves in an elaborated sphere ofthe domestic. In the aftermath of war, Dutch-Afrikaans women targeted impoverishedwhites for help whilst also actively participating in the construction of racialised Afrikanerculture. Contrary to existing historiography, maternalist discourse long pre-dated theconservative ‘Volksmoeder’ ideology asserted by Afrikaner nationalist men in the late1910s. ACVV leaders drew on an idealised notion of motherhood first elaborated in DutchReformed Church magazines during the late nineteenth century, meshing religious withnationalist identity. The first generation of ACVV women were careful to preserve theindependence of their organisation and carve out a place in public whilst also signallingtheir support for the dominant gender order. From the 1920s, however, a second generationof nationalist women took up leadership positions in philanthropic, cultural and party-pol-itical organisations. Theirs was the female dominion of politicised ‘vrouesake’ (women’sissues). They embraced motherhood whilst seeking to extend their sphere of action toinclude active participation in formulating social policy.

Self-made Women Nationalists?

What place should be accorded to the female, and to that territory traditionally attributedto women – the domestic – in the making of Afrikaner nationalism? Most historiansof Afrikaner nationalism have placed women on the terrain of politicised but privatedomesticity, located beside public, political terrain traversed by men. A few have counteredsuch views with portrayals of more assertive women acting on terrains both public andpolitical. According to Helen Bradford, ‘despite a small body of feminist literature, thehegemonic gender identity of “Afrikaner nationalist” is male’.1

Substantial publications on the history of Afrikaner nationalism before apartheid, such

1 H. Bradford, ‘Regendering Afrikanerdom: the 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War’, in I. Blom and K. Hagemann (eds),Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, Berg, 2000), p. 207.

ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/03/010155-22 2003 Journal of Southern African StudiesDOI: 10.1080/0305707032000060485

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as Dunbar Moodie’s The Rise of Afrikanerdom and Dan O’Meara’s Volkskapitalisme, areeasily identifiable as unselfconsciously androcentric. However, in key respects their analy-ses of the origins, strategies and power of Afrikaner nationalism have remained definitive– certainly regarding the assumption that this was a political movement driven by men. Infact, historians who have asked questions about women and Afrikaner nationalism have alsotended to argue that men constructed and elaborated this ideology. In an early reference tothe importance of a female constituency for cultural Afrikaner nationalists, Isabel Hofmeyrsuggested that the success of the Afrikaans illustrated magazines that were launched from1910 was largely due to ‘the family and women’s position within it’.2 Writers in suchpublications as Die Huisgenoot (The Home Companion) associated Afrikaans with ‘theintimate terrain of the household’ and sought to teach readers of ‘a women’s media’ theirproper role as mothers. Working-class wives rather than their husbands were first tointernalise an Afrikaner identity by reading Afrikaans books and magazines. Hofmeyridentified women as important consumers of Afrikaner culture, and the domesticated spaceof home as key to the construction of a racialised, Afrikaans cultural-political subjectivity.3

Drawing on Jeff Butler’s pioneering essay on the activities of the Afrikaanse ChristelikeVroue Vereniging (Afrikaans Christian Women’s Society, hereafter the ACVV) in aneastern Cape town, she also pointed to the importance of women’s philanthropic work forAfrikaner nationalism.4 Butler’s microcosm of Cradock ACVV women’s welfare effortssuggested the importance of ‘Afrikaner women, acting outside the explicitly politicalrealm’, who ‘frequently played an important part in defining Afrikaners as a self-consciousethnic group’. However, his study did not reflect on the extent of female participation in theconstruction of nationalist discourse.5

The first work to make broad claims about the extent and nature of Afrikaner women’spolitical involvement certainly corroborated the idea of women as consumers of ideology,whilst also emphasising the importance of an idealised notion of motherhood for Afrikanernationalism. Gaitskell and Unterhalter suggested of Afrikaner women in the twentiethcentury that they were ‘silent’ whilst ‘male cultural entrepreneurs’ shaped an image ofAfrikaner motherhood emphasising ‘nobility, passivity, virtuous nurturing and protection ofchildren’.6 Elsabe Brink also argued that it was mainly discursively and through amale-invented iconography celebrating volksmoeders (mothers of the nation) that thepresence of the feminine was felt in Afrikaner nationalism. Brink pointed to the labours ofmiddle-class women committed to a racialised philanthropy and closely aligned to thatbastion of Afrikanerdom, the Dutch Reformed Church.7 However, she cast nationalist-

2 I. Hofmeyr, ‘Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Ethnic Identity, 1902–1924’,in S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds), The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa(London, Longman, 1987), pp. 113–114.

3 Ibid. Hofmeyr assesses the impact of magazines such as Die Brandwag (The Sentinel, launched in 1910) and DieHuisgenoot (The Home Companion, started in 1916) within a broader discussion of the cultural nationalist activityof the post-war ‘Tweede Taal Beweging’ (Second Language Movement) and the efforts of organisations such asthe Afrikaanse Taal Vereniging (Afrikaans Language Society, launched in 1905).

4 J. Butler’s paper was later published as ‘Afrikaner Women and the Creation of Ethnicity in a Small South AfricanTown, 1902–1950’, in L. Vail (ed), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, James Currey, andBerkeley, University California Press, 1989).

5 Butler, ‘Afrikaner Women and the Creation of Ethnicity’, p. 56.6 D. Gaitskell and E. Unterhalter, ‘Mothers of the Nation: a Comparative Analysis of Nation, Race and Motherhood

in Afrikaner Nationalism and the African National Congress’, in N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias (eds), Women– Nation – State (London, Macmillan, 1989), p. 60.

7 For the most part, Brink relied on research by B. Y. Eisenberg, ‘Gender, Class and Afrikaner Nationalism: theSouth African Vrouefederasie’ (BA Honours dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1987) for herconclusions about Afrikaans women’s philanthropic societies. Brink’s paper followed and complemented herdetailed research on white, Afrikaans working-class women in the Garment Workers’ Union. See ‘ “Maar net ‘nKlomp Factory Meide”: Afrikaner Family and Community on the Witwatersrand during the 1920s’, in B. Bozzoli

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supporting women as ‘man-made’, for men invented and elaborated the notion of thevolksmoeder through which women were presented with a circumscribed sphere for actionto help build their people. Her ‘striking’ find was ‘the near total absence of femalevoices … in the construction of the ideal of Afrikaner womanhood’.8 Middle-class womenaccepted the ideal presented to them because it ‘gave legitimacy to their role in society aswives, mothers and voluntary workers’.9

Brink did note a few exceptional Afrikaner women who wrote and published from the1930s. One such woman was M. E. Rothmann, committed Afrikaner nationalist, ‘celebratedauthor’ and member of an organisation mainly focused on racialised philanthropy, theACVV. But she and a few like-minded women were ‘more concerned with the actual thanthe idealised lives of women’.10 In her research for the Carnegie Commission on povertyamongst whites, Rothmann showed sensitivity and sympathy for impoverished (white andmostly Afrikaans) women whilst also accepting the centrality of motherhood in women’slives. But such ‘pioneering work’ had limited impact compared with the considerablepopular influence of Postma and other male propagators of the volksmoeder ideal. It wasonly during the 1930s and 1940s, through the efforts of female, Afrikaner garment workerswho sought to claim for themselves a volksmoeder heritage otherwise associated withmiddle-class women, suggests Brink, that this notion was partially contested.11

Anne McClintock drew on these essays to elaborate on ‘the gender component’ ofAfrikaner nationalism as ‘synonymous with white male interests, white male aspirations andwhite male politics’.12 This was an ideology with ‘the contradictory figure of thevolksmoeder’ at its centre. McClintock asserted that the ‘social category’ of thevolksmoeder was not an ideology ‘imposed … on hapless female victims’ but ‘a changing,dynamic ideology rife with paradox, under constant contest by men and women’.13 But onceagain, Afrikaner nationalist men invented a volksmoeder figure that celebrated women asapolitical, suffering and self-sacrificial. The icon of the volksmoeder was paradoxicalbecause it recognised ‘the power of (white) motherhood’ whilst functioning as ‘a retro-spective iconography of gender containment … of domestic service’. Women ‘played acrucial role in the invention of Afrikanerdom’. However, white women’s activism tookplace ‘within the economy of the domestic household, where ‘the cultural power ofAfrikaner motherhood was mobilised in the service of white nation building’.14

Already in 1991, Lou-Marie Kruger pointed to a ‘basic contradictory tension’ in thework of Brink, Gaitskell and Unterhalter: ‘While setting out to break the silence aboutwomen’s role in history these feminist histories in fact stress the ways and extent towhich women’s identities, roles and actions are ultimately moulded by men’.15 Afrikaner

Footnote 7 continued(ed), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987) and ‘TheAfrikaner Women of the Garment Workers’ Union, 1918–1939’ (MA dissertation, University of theWitwatersrand, 1986).

8 E. Brink, ‘Man-made Women: Gender, Class and the Ideology of the Volksmoeder’, in C. Walker (ed), Womenand Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town, David Philip, 1990), pp. 273 and 281. According to Brink,Englishwoman Emily Hobhouse was, ironically, the only woman who had a part in its construction.

9 Brink, ‘Man-made Women’, p. 291.10 Brink also discusses two other Afrikaans women who completed academic studies in the 1930s – Erika Theron,

who researched the lives of ‘coloured’ and white women factory workers, and Hansi Pollak, who investigatedthe working conditions of white women on the Witwatersrand. These unpublished works had, in Brink’sassessment, very little ‘impact on popular consciousness’.

11 Ibid., pp. 286–290.12 A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York, Routledge,

1995), p. 369.13 Ibid., p. 378.14 Ibid., p. 379.15 L. Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity: Women and Afrikaner Nationalism in the Volksmoeder Discourse

of Die Boerevrou, 1919–1931’ (MA dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1991), p. 25.

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nationalism was ‘assumed to be a male discourse, shaped by males to serve the interest ofmales’.16 Of course, feminist scholars of the late 1980s and early 1990s were also beginningto explore female conservatism and women’s support for gendered social systems in whichmen wielded most power.17 But Kruger’s close analysis of Die Boerevrouw (The Farm/Boerwoman) – a magazine ‘by and for women’ launched in 1919 – demonstrated that femaleAfrikaner nationalists were articulate and audible in their construction and elaboration ofvolksmoeder discourse. She also identified an early source of politicised and patriotic writingby Dutch-Afrikaans women, published during the last months of the South African War orsoon after, and speaking out against the British policies of destroying Boer properties andof interning civilians in concentration camps.18

More recently, Louise Vincent has discussed ‘the way in which politically active Afrikanernationalist women in the early years of the Afrikaner ethnic mobilisation both interactedwith … the figure of woman as “volksmoeder” and were acted on by it’. While she drawson my own and Kruger’s research in her discussion of Volksmoeder discourse, Vincent alsoextends claims for women’s active participation in the construction of Volksmoeder discoursethrough discussion of the Women’s National Party publication, Die Burgeres (The [female]Citizen) as ‘an explicitly political voice for Afrikaner women’.19 The patriotic leafletsinvestigated by Kruger were also drawn on by Helen Bradford to bolster her argument forthe South African War as ‘the single most significant event fuelling not merely modernAfrikaner nationalism, but a regendered Afrikaner nationalism transferring its weight fromits (weak) male to its (strong) female leg’.20 Bradford argued that ‘fin de siecle nationalismwas a profoundly gendered project … centred not on people’s ethnic peculiarities, but on theideal Afrikaner man’. The task of being ‘brother Afrikaners’ was rejected by many Boer menearly in the war. Republican women were far more vociferous in their rejection of surrender.They were also active in adopting and adapting nationalist symbolism. ‘(E)rased from mostnationalist discourse’, their ‘patriotic duties and symbols were not well defined. They createdtheir own, fuelled by fierce anti-imperialism and racism’.21

Bradford’s ideas about Dutch-Afrikaans women and their relationship to the political differin important respects from most hitherto published work on Afrikaner women’s politics. Shepaints a picture of women who ‘invaded’ the domain of politics and ‘laid claim to publicspeech, politics and arms’. Boer women ‘gatecrashed into a homosocial volk’ during the war.22

Already known as capable of intense resistance and in spite of the initial ‘close links betweenguns, masculinity and nationalism’, Boer women proved, and were acknowledged as suchby various observers, ‘the fiercest advocates of war to the bitter end’.23 Bradford pointedto the fact that ‘between 1902 and 1914, nationalists formed women’s organizations, erected

16 Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity’, pp. 24–25. Her emphasis.17 Besides writing on female Afrikaner nationalists, Gaitskell researched the activities of women in the context of

church and mission initiatives. See ‘Female Mission Initiatives: Black and White Women in Three WitwatersrandChurches, 1903–1939’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1981); and ‘ “Wailing for Purity”: Prayer Unions,African Mothers and Adolescent Daughters, 1912–1940’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds), Industrialisationand Social Change in South Africa (London, Longman, 1982). See also Shireen Hassim, ‘ “Steel Their Souls”.The Inkatha Women’s Brigade and the Politics of Gender in Natal’ (unpublished paper, Biennial Conference ofthe Political Science Association of South Africa, 1991); and ‘Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: ThePolitics of the Inkatha Women’s Brigade’, Feminist Review, 43 (1993), pp. 1–25.

18 Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity’, pp. 134–140.19 L. Vincent, ‘The Power behind the Scenes: The Afrikaner Nationalist Women’s Parties, 1915 to 1931’, South

African Historical Journal, 40 (1999), p. 52. Vincent’s more recent paper on the women of the Garment Workers’Union discusses their ‘active engagement with the volksmoeder idea’. See ‘Bread and Honour: White WorkingClass Women and Afrikaner Nationalism in the 1930s’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 1 (March 2000).

20 Bradford, ‘Regendering Afrikanerdom’, p. 207.21 Ibid., p. 219.22 Ibid., p. 207.23 Ibid., p. 211.

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a women’s monument, celebrated Women’s Day, promoted the “mother tongue” ’. Shealso noted the post-war recasting of women ‘not as amazons, but as mothers of the volk’.24

Her research offers an implicit challenge to those interested in questions of gender andnationalism. It is difficult to reconcile the presence of vociferously politicised Boer womenat the turn of the century with the dominant idea of Afrikaner women as, at best, con-sumers of nationalist discourse in the post-war, foundational years of modern Afrikanernationalism. Kruger’s research is more compatible with Bradford’s view. But whileshe argues for the emergence of significant debate and discussion amongst women onthe duties of female members of the volk in the 1920s, she concurs with Brink that mencreated a coherent volksmoeder iconography in the late 1910s. Did Dutch-Afrikaans womenclaim space for unprecedented political activity in the exceptional circumstance of war atthe turn of the twentieth century – only to acquiesce in a nationalism forged by men in itsaftermath?

One answer to this question may be provided by way of a closer investigation of thewomen’s welfare societies to which large numbers of particularly middle-class women, whocame to identify as Afrikaner nationalist, belonged for much of the twentieth century. Brinkidentified the voice of M. E. Rothmann as exceptional but also noted that she wasprominent in the ACVV. Investigation of Rothmann’s milieu of voluntary work reveals anextensive philanthropic practice involving members across the Cape – a women’s ‘domin-ion’ of racialised philanthropy – and numbering influential and outspoken female Afrikanernationalists.25 In 1926, Rothmann, who would call her autobiography My Beskeie Deel (MyUnassuming Contribution), emphasised that women involved in charity worked so imper-ceptibly ‘dat ons partykeer voel ons moet soek om hulle spore te sien’ (that we sometimesfeel we must search for their footprints). She went on to claim that these were often made‘voor die mans, en die departemente en regeringskantore, daar gaan loop het’ (before themen, and the departments and government offices went to walk there).26

However, one pervasive characteristic that the ACVV shared with the many cultural andphilanthropic societies founded at the turn of the twentieth century facilitates the task of theresearcher even as it calls for reflection on the nature of female Afrikaner nationalistdomesticity in the modernising context of early twentieth-century South Africa. The womenwho established the ACVV in 1904 did more than build a network of branches operatingin the vicinity of villages, towns and cities, run by the requisite office-holders and headedby a governing executive – a mode of organisation familiar to many of them by virtue ofbelonging to the Dutch Reformed Church’s Vrouwen Zending Bond (Women’s MissionarySociety), then some fifteen years in existence. Also central to the activities of Afrikaanswomen’s philanthropic organisations were words spoken and written as part of formalisedactivity. Members held regular meetings in private homes or at their local church, organisedpublic cultural events and met at an annual congress to listen to leading women’s speechesand to participate in discussions. Branches habitually recorded their meetings. Reports tothe executive, open letters from branch and executive members, the minutes of meetingsand conference proceedings were regularly published in leading Dutch (later Afrikaans)newspapers and cultural magazines.

Investigation of these records reveals how the discursive threads of an evolving

24 Ibid.25 The term ‘dominion’ has been used by Robyn Muncy to describe the ‘interlocking network of women’ involved

in the provision of welfare in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. R. Muncy,Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform: 1890–1935 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991). AsAlice Kessler-Harris explains in ‘Women and Welfare: Public Interventions in Private Lives’, Radical HistoryReview, 56 (1993), the word ‘dominion’ indicates both ‘its self-governing nature’ and the ‘limits on its power’.

26 M. E. Rothmann, Die Burger, ‘Oor die ACVV’, 19 January 1926.

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Afrikaner nationalism were woven into the fabric of their communications. Indeed, theACVV’s history shows the early involvement of nationalist-identified women in recastingideals of womanhood. It demonstrates the entanglement of early Afrikaner nationalism withracially circumscribed philanthropic ventures through which women located themselves inan elaborated sphere of the domestic, and confirms the extent to which ‘the womanquestion’ was identified as a topic for discussion in early Afrikaner nationalist print culture.Moreover, the first three decades of the ACVV’s existence also involved a significant shiftin attitude towards how things womanly and domestic could relate to the ‘public’ and‘political’. From 1904 to around 1920 – as the ACVV established its philanthropic practice– its leaders would toe a careful line of acceptable femininity and independent organisation.From the early 1920s, more confident and assertive voices would seek to widen theboundaries of organised, female domesticity.

Volksmoeders and Philanthropy, 1904–1920

A central impetus for the ACVV’s launch was the fact of hugely increased poverty,including numbers of arme blanken (poor whites), in the aftermath of the South Africanwar. From 1904, the minute books and annual reports of most branch secretaries detailedcharitable activity, as increasing numbers of organised and mostly well-to-do Dutch-Afrikaans women handed out old clothes, visited the poor and provided medicines.Branches were first established in the more developed and prosperous farming regions ofthe eastern and western Cape, where townswomen often dominated meetings, althoughinfluential women also included farmers’ wives. The network soon extended into the Karoo;well-to-do Victoria West boasted a branch by 1905 and a year later delegates from theKaroo village of Carnarvon and the northern Cape hamlet of Ritchie attended Congress.Branches in the harbour towns of East London and Port Elizabeth were established by 1910.Cape Town was the most vigorous of the ‘urban’ branches and exerted an influence ongeneral policy well beyond its actual numbers.

In decades to come, the ACVV would ostensibly eschew ‘politics’ in order to side-stepthe often bitter party-political schisms that fractured ‘Afrikaners’ and centred on the verydefinition of this term. In the years preceding Union and as politicians pushed for differentversions of white nationhood, those Dutch-Afrikaans women who identified philanthropy asa worthwhile endeavour entered the fray to opt for particular and competing meanings ofvolk and nasie. The Zuid-Afrikaansche Vrouwe Vereniging (South African Women’sSociety), as it was first called, was launched as a national organisation by women in theCape Colony. The ZAVV constitution of 1904 urged women to promote all that was ‘zuiverAfrikaansch’ (pure Afrikaans) and would serve to build ‘Taal en Volk’ (Language andPeople). Elizabeth Roos, its first president, launched the Vereeniging with a speech thaturged mothers and daughters to urgent action in protection of a volk threatened by‘vreemdelingen’ (foreigners) and their alien customs. The word ‘Christelyk’ (Christian) wassoon added to the Society’s name and, in 1907, ‘South African’ was replaced with‘Afrikaansch’, thereby giving formal expression to the ACVV’s choice of an ethnic-specificdefinition of volk. This followed bitter clashes with another women’s organisation, theZuid-Afrikaansche Vrouwe Federatie (South African Women’s Federation). Its memberswere Afrikaans- and English-speakers who identified with a post-war politics of reconcili-ation and pursued an ideal of a white, heterogeneous nation.27 The ‘vurige’ (passionate)

27 The Federation was founded by Mrs G. Solomon, married to the Jewish politician and proprietor of Cape Town’snewspaper, The Argus. ZACVV women objected to English leadership and rejected the arguments byDutch-Afrikaans members of the ZAVF that the description ‘Afrikaansch’ could apply to persons of variedreligious background and the word volk to ‘elke blanke nationaliteit’ (every white nationality).

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wish of such women as the former Free State President’s wife, Tibbie Steyn, for a unionof ‘al de Zuid-Afrikaansche vrouwen’ (all South African women), made way for a practicalcompromise, in which they agreed that each organisation should be allocated a specificterritory to work in – the Free State for ZAVF, the Cape for ACVV.

The prominent social status of Elizabeth Roos as predikantsvrouw (she was married toa highly-placed minister in the Dutch Reformed Church) emphasised the ACVV’s closeallegiance to the DRC. She and other founding members also made good use of the DRCinfrastructure available to them – copies of the constitution, rules and regulations werepresented to ‘elke predikants vrouw der Hollandsche kerk’ (every minister’s wife in theDutch church.28 While many women who held office in local branches were marriedto prominent farmers, businessmen and members of parliament, the usual practice of theearly ACVV was to start branches in rural areas by contacting the local DRC minister’swife.29

Ethnic identity was also infused with the idea of blank. Regardless of cultural identityor church affiliation, people with skins of darker hue were outsiders to the volk. Bydefinition, blacks had no claim to urgent help. In fact, they – and particularly Afrikaans-speaking gekleurden (Coloureds) – were the threat from which arme blanken must berescued. That ‘white’ poor were specifically deserving of charity was an idea that hadalready gained ground amongst Dutch-Afrikaans speakers in the previous century.30 Duringthe 1890s (when Roos and several other leading ACVV women had already involvedthemselves with racialised philanthropic ventures), female writers in the DRC’s mission-related publications contributed to occasional discussions about the need for charityamongst impoverished whites.31 Now, racialised Christian charity began to be fused with anAfrikaner nationalist mission. Some of the more isolated rural branches would be slow toabsorb the message of racial exclusivity.32 Others, however, accepted the righteous task ofdemarcating racial borders with alacrity and, as early as 1907, readers of the Colony’sleading Dutch newspaper could note that ACVV women had moved ‘onze arme blanken,die in de locatie tussen de gekleurde woonden’ (our poor whites, who were living in thelocation amongst the coloureds), to more appropriate lodgings.33

For Roos and her fellow founding members of the ACVV, their organisation’s taskextended beyond caring for the poor to the promotion of the language of the volk. Branchpresidents urged members to read, write and speak ‘onze taal meer dan vroeger’ (ourlanguage more than previously).34 This was a pertinent statement. Roos had probablyreceived a private education in Dutch during the 1860s. But many ACVV members wereeducated in English-medium women’s seminaries established by the Dutch ReformedChurch from the 1870s.35 The South African war had prompted numbers of women to

28 Cape Archives (hereafter CA), A1953 (ACVV Private Collection), A1/1/1/1 (Minutes of ACVV Meetings), 1September 1904.

29 CA, Archives of the Dutch Reformed Church (hereafter DRC), V21 (Dutch Reformed Church ACVV Collection),1/1 (Minutes of ACVV Executive Meetings), 10 February 1906.

30 Public discussion of ‘white’ poverty as a social problem date from the 1880s and was mostly expressed in theDutch Reformed Church’s journals – the DRC also issued an open letter on ‘Our Poor Whites’ in 1893.

31 M. du Toit, ‘Women, Welfare and the Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism: A Social History of the AfrikaanseChristelike Vroue Vereniging, c.1870–1939’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1996), pp. 54–7.

32 De Goede Hoop (October 1906), pp. 93–94; ibid. (September 1905), p. 66. CA, A1953, Add 1/12/5/1/1/1(Strijdenburg Branch Minutes), 9 March 1918. For more detailed discussion of the extent to which the ACVVexecutive’s ideas about a racialised philanthropy penetrated the Cape countryside, see du Toit, ‘Women, Welfareand the Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism’. I suggest that some platteland branches, particularly in the lessdeveloped northern and north-western Cape, would be slow to grasp the idea of an imagined community thatextended beyond their local parish.

33 De Zuid-Afrikaan, 16 November 1907.34 Ibid., 3 September 1908.35 The context for the establishment of these seminaries is explained below.

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change their views on the now imperial tongue, but many had not honed their writing skillsin Dutch, let alone Afrikaans – the widely spoken but yet to be formalised derivative fromDutch, indigenous and slave-spoken tongues that found growing favour as the ‘pure’language of the volk. Whilst assiduously avoiding direct engagement with disputes aroundwhich version of the taal the volk should read and write, executive members now explainedthe need to popularise the history and language of their people in Dutch cultural journalsand newspapers.36 ACVV members from affluent western Cape towns and more isolatedvillages employed a variety of strategies to promote the use of Dutch at school, in the homeand on public occasions.37

Clearly, the ACVV’s everyday practice involved promoting identification with animagined community defined by race, language and religion. But to what extent did ACVVwomen participate in the gendering of post-war Afrikaner nationalist discourse? In heropening address at the Society’s first congress, Roos already emphasised the crucial role of‘moeders en dochters’ (mothers and daughters) for the survival of the volk. In fact, numbersof ACVV women were familiar with an older, deeply gendered, largely pre-nationalistreligious discourse, and proceeded to mould this into often explicitly Afrikaner nationalistform.

Brink has claimed a lack of women’s voices in the articulation of an ‘idealised notionof Afrikaner womanhood’. She traced the idea of the volksmoeder to late nineteenth-centurypro-Boer histories and the glorification of Afrikaner women by the Vrouemonument – the‘Women’s Monument’ inaugurated in 1913 to commemorate Boer female and child victimsof the South African war. She argued for the construction and elaboration of idealisedmotherhood by such writers as Postma, whose book, De Boervrouw, Moeder van Haar Volk(The Boer Woman, Mother of her Nation), appeared in 1918. Postma expanded earlierefforts to create a symbol of female heroism and suffering by strongly emphasisingmotherhood and women’s centrality in the family.38 Whilst he presented the feminine as acrucial source of moral strength for the Afrikaner people, he also cast women’s actions asessentially non-political. Written at a time when the ‘massive influx of young, mostlyunskilled Afrikaner men and women’ to urban areas ‘gave rise to grave concern for theirmoral safety in state, church and welfare organizations’, Brink argued that Postma’s bookwas intended as instruction, particularly for young girls, in such virtues as self-reliance,housewifeliness, and a sense of religion.39

36 Fashioning Afrikaans into a ‘respectable’ and professional language was no easy task. In the years immediatelyafter the war, Dutch-Afrikaans intellectuals who perceived English to be a threat to the continued use of their ownlanguage vigorously debated the future form of the taal. At the heart of the dispute was the need for a standardisedwritten language that could hold its own against English. The likes of Gustav Preller (a central figure in theAfrikaanse Taal Genootskap, launched in 1905) argued for the use of Afrikaans as a written language, but othersinsisted on the inherent superiority of Dutch. However, the exact version of Nederlandsch was also a matter fordispute. Some argued for ‘zuiver’ (pure) Dutch, while others advocated the introduction of a simplified spellingand grammar. The ACVV’s continued use of unmodified (but sometimes ungrammatical) Dutch reflected themiddle-class character and political caution of the organisation. Afrikaans began to gain the upper hand in thelanguage dispute from 1917.

37 CA, A1953, 1/1/1 (ACVV congress reports), 1905; ‘Jaarverslag van de tak der ACVV te Worcester’, DeZuid-Afrikaan, 21 September 1907; ‘Kaapstadse tak der ACVV’, 19 November 1907. See du Toit, ‘Women,Welfare and the Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism’, for more detail and an assessment of the extent to whichthe ACVV leadership’s cultural nationalism and philanthropic practice were infused with notions of a volk thatextended beyond the boundaries of the local parish and was able to penetrate the Cape countryside.

38 Brink, ‘Man-made Women’, p. 280.39 Ibid. See Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity’ for a more detailed discussion of the construction of a

discourse of the Volksmoeder at this time. Kruger argues that, although ‘the symbolism of women’s sufferingwas … appropriated for the Afrikaner nationalist cause’ during the campaign for the Vrouwenmonument, ‘this wasnot yet done wholly in terms of a mothering discourse’. Speeches made on Vrouedag (Women’s Day) referredto the idea of the mother of the nation, but speakers ‘emphasised women, rather than mothers … We do notyet … find a distinctive volksmoeder discourse or even a special stress on the idea of mothering in the proceedingsat the monument. The emphasis was rather on national sentiment or national unity’ (p. 143).

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While this was certainly a significant contribution to a consolidating discourse of thevolksmoeder, perusal of Dutch-Afrikaans publications and the ACVV archives reveal amaternalist discourse that long pre-dated Postma’s work and was often articulated bywomen. In fact, from its earliest years, and well before cultural entrepreneurs (male andfemale) elaborated a pervasive Afrikaans domesticity in the Afrikaans cultural magazinesof the 1910s, discussions in the ACVV’s monthly columns (first published in De GoedeHoop, a Dutch religious-cultural journal) centred around motherhood. In this respect, theideas articulated on these pages reflected ACVV women’s roots in a religious world-viewfirst articulated in the 1870s. Scholarship has hitherto tended to emphasise the ‘masculinist’character of Boer Republicanism in the late nineteenth century or the lack of a ‘genderdiscourse’ in nineteenth-century Dutch-Afrikaans society (although occasional representa-tions of Boer women as brave and patriotic were also noted).40 But another context for theproduction of an idealised notion of motherhood had a much greater impact and shaped theworld-view of many first-generation ACVV women.

That the Dutch Reformed Church – the central social institution for Dutch-Afrikaanscommunities in the Colony – had been key to the shaping of gender discourse in theprevious century should not come as a surprise. From the 1860s, a ‘new’ orthodoxy in thechurch had transformed ‘the traditional patterns of DRC church practices and religioussensibility almost beyond recognition’ and provided women with new scope for church andparticularly mission-related activities.41 New methods of organisation in the DRC includedholding conferences and launching a wide range of religious publications aimed at a popularaudience. An apparently spontaneous religious revival that swept the Cape countryside wasgiven official sanction by the church. Predikantsvrouwen established a network of prayergroups for female parishioners and, by the late 1880s, the Vrouwen Zending Bond(Women’s Missionary Association). In the 1870s, a minister prominent in the DRC’smodernising movement had also invited teachers from women’s seminaries in the UnitedStates to found similar institutions at the Cape. Numbers of young Dutch-Afrikaans womengraduated from the new seminaries, versed in the teachings of evangelical piety. Here, aselsewhere, evangelicalism involved a ‘feminisation of religion’ and the exaltation ofqualities usually associated with women in Dutch-Afrikaans society.42 From the 1880s,letters, poems, sermons and stories in DRC missionary publications (mostly written by malechurch ministers) also specifically and extensively celebrated a maternal piety that glorifiedwomen’s domestic duties, emphasised mothers’ responsibility for their children’s souls andpraised quiet and modest worship.43

Several years after the founding of the ACVV, a meshing of religious and nationalistidentity amongst female, middle-class Dutch-Afrikaans speakers was apparent. Working forkerk, volk en taal (church, people and language) – this was the ACVV motto – involveda crucial reshaping of the older discourse of maternal duty. At first, women’s duty to theirchurch was often emphasised, and some speakers made no reference at all to the idea of

40 Bradford, ‘Regendering Afrikaner Nationalism’, p. 209; Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity’, pp. 103–111;Brink, ‘Man-made Women’, pp. 275–277. Kruger argues for the absence of ‘a comprehensive discourse dealingspecifically with women and women’s roles before 1900 … women, gender and gender roles were not importantissues at this time’. See M. du Toit, ‘ “Moedermeesteres”: Dutch-Afrikaans Women’s Entry into the PublicSphere in the Cape Colony, 1860–1896’, in W. Woodward, P. Hayes and G. Minkley (eds), Deep Histories:Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2002), for a more detaileddiscussion.

41 A. du Toit, ‘The Cape Afrikaners’ Failed Liberal Moment’, in J. Butler, R. Elphick and D. Welsh (eds), DemocraticLiberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect (Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. 59.

42 J. Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860(Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1985), pp. 73–74, argues that the qualities of the reborn Christian were qualitiesconventionally accepted as ‘quintessentially female’: humility, self-denial, submission, obedience.

43 See du Toit, ‘ “Moedermeesteres” ’.

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volk. For example, a woman addressing an eastern Cape branch meeting in 1906 remindedfellow ACVV members that even the unborn baby assumed its mother’s moral characteris-tics and that it was their honourable duty to fashion children into worthy images of God –but she made no mention of volk or nation.44 However, a meshing of religious andnationalist identity amongst middle-class Dutch-Afrikaans speakers in the Cape was alreadytaking place, as was evident from a poem presented at an early congress, in which motherswere urged to let their influence ‘schitt’ren/Als Nationaal Bezielend Licht’ (sparkle asNational Inspiring Light), to protect the house altar and to ‘kweek ons Volk tot Christen-helden’ (nurture our People into Christian Heroes). Mothers were called upon to rearchildren not only for the community of the church but also to build a people defined bylanguage.45 The poet was male, but women were also blending religiosity and nationalism.In 1907, a rural ACVV president participated in remoulding the long-available religiousdiscourse when she urged that ‘het volk zal zijn wat de moeders het maken’ (the future ofthe volk depends on the mothers), who should teach children their first prayers in the mothertongue and instil ‘liefde voor hun kerk, taal, godsdienst’ (love for church, language andreligion). By 1910, public discussions about children’s education in the ACVV’s regularpages in De Goede Hoop reflected a more thorough meshing of older, church-based idealsof motherhood with those belonging to ethnic nationalism, and letters or tracts thatarticulated women’s moral duty in purely religious terms had virtually disappeared. For theACVV, women’s moral duty towards church and volk were often closely linked: ‘Moeders,gij ziet wat er op onze schouders ligt. De toekomst, net slechts van ons kind, maar van onsland, volk en kerk’ (Mothers, you see what lies on our shoulders. The future not only ofour children, but also of our country, people and church).46

The older religious discourse and the new, more overtly nationalist messages shared onecentral trait: the promotion of an idealised vision of motherhood and an articulation ofmaternal duty that focused on the privacy of the home. Perhaps this emphasis and thefamiliar sight of women practising charitable work explain why Afrikaans female philan-thropic societies such as the ACVV attracted few negative comments from those unused towomen speaking or acting in public. But while ACVV members affirmed women’sadherence to ‘tradition’, they also proclaimed their moral guardianship in the public spacesof newspapers and cultural magazines. ‘Resolutions’ annually drawn up by branches werewell publicised and debated at the ACVV’s congress – the proceedings of which alsoreceived detailed coverage. In the first few years after the war, this Cape-based organisationestablished a comfortable and respected public niche for itself. Elsewhere in the extendedBritish territories of post-war South Africa, some women bitterly complained that theirchurch expected them to revert to silent worship now that the war was over. But thephilanthropic and cultural efforts of organised Dutch-Afrikaans women met with no effortsto close the space for female public activity and speech that they had claimed during thewar.47

44 De Goede Hoop (October 1906), pp. 93–94.45 De Zuid-Afrikaan, 21 September 1907. For a more detailed discussion, see du Toit, ‘Women, Welfare and the

Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism’.46 De Goede Hoop (December 1912), p. 149.47 A postwar backlash against women who claimed new roles during times of upheaval certainly occurred in the

Transvaal and Natal, at least in some rural areas. On 18 November 1903, the DRC’s official publication for theTransvaal carried an article ‘Mogen Vrouwen in het Openbaar Bidden?’ (May Women Pray in Public?). Thisquestion apparently divided the author’s congregation in Heidelberg – certain (male) members were refusing toattend prayer meetings together with women, even threatening to leave the church. The writer argued that whilewomen could not interpret texts, their right to pray in public must be respected. Perhaps it was his words thatprompted some ‘Zusters’ in Vrijheid (Natal) to write an angry and bitter letter: ‘One of my reasons for writingis a feeling of disappointment in the outcome of the bitter time of war and suffering that we experienced, andthat such divisions can now exist between those calling themselves Christians. Today such people find women’s

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However, the new organisation was hardly perceived as a firebrand by Dutch news-papers at the Cape. Small wonder, when early public addresses by Roos, running to severalclosely printed pages, were preceded and followed by the prayers and speeches of eminentmen:

Oproeping der Presidente van het Eerste Kongres gehouden te Kaapstad, 29 Mei 1905 met deopeningsrede van Ds. D. S. Botha; Ode, door den heer C. W. H. van der Post, toespraak vanden edele heer J. H. Hofmeyr. Sluitingswoord van Ds. J. P. van Heerden.(Call to action by the President of the First Congress held at Cape Town, 29 May 1905 withthe opening speech by Rev D. S. Botha; Ode, by the honourable Mr C. W. H. van der Post,speech by the honourable Sir J. H. Hofmeyr. Closing words by Rev J. P. van Heerden.)48

On one occasion, when ACVV leaders invited members of the DRC synod and their wivesto join them for an evening of lectures on the role of women, De Zuid-Afrikaan reportedapprovingly that female members did not speak in public – instead church ministers spokeon their behalf. From the beginning, male speakers routinely reminded women of theirduties ‘als vrouw, als moeder, als Christin’ (as woman, as mother, as Christian). At times,speeches included muted warnings against women moving beyond their allotted sphere. Thetimes necessitated female action, but women’s ‘roeping als huismoeder’ (calling ashouse-mother) must not be abandoned.49

The urge to praise instances of ACVV members’ proper silence explicitly and to remindthem of their maternal duty suggests an uneasy acceptance of female public activity. Withthe advent of local campaigns for female suffrage, such messages became more frequentand urgent. When the ACVV was first launched, ‘votes for women’ was a non-issue in theCape Dutch press.50 Sporadic reports of militant ‘suffragette’ action in Britain had madelittle impact in South Africa. In 1907, however, the newly launched, largely English, branchof the Women’s Enfranchisement League in Cape Town successfully used debate inparliament to thrust women’s suffrage into the centre of public discussion. In the Dutch-Afrikaans press, measured editorials, heated exchanges in the letter columns, lengthyarguments from local debating societies and witty poems all dissected the issue. Most malewriters to Cape Town’s Dutch daily, De Zuid-Afrikaan (The South African) opposed givingwomen the right to vote, appealing to religion and tradition to support their views. MostDutch-Afrikaans women who entered this male-dominated debate also agreed that ‘onbij-belse’ (unbiblical) suffragettes threatened ‘het huiselik leven’ (domestic life).51

The urgent tone of discussion revealed an unprecedented interest in women’s apparentlychanging role in society. Indeed, new public concern that the separate spheres of femininityand masculinity were being challenged, went beyond opposition to suffrage. The spectre ofthe ‘New Woman’ crystallised a more general male anxiety about changing gender roles.Writers lamented that women were highly educated and entered careers previously heldby men. ‘In andere landen hebben de vrouwen het beheer van bijna alles in handen’ (Inother countries women control almost everything).52 For some women were formidable

Footnote 47 continuedprayer offensive, but in the days of war and exile, when thousands of sisters came together to publicly imploreand pray for our oppressed volk, then no one took offence. Even across the ocean voices reached us: “pray forus”. Oh, how freely we could then pray!’ (De Vereeniging, 23 March 1904, my translation).

48 CA, A1953, 3/2/1 (ACVV Congress Reports), 1905.49 De Goede Hoop (November 1906), p. 16; CA, A1953, Report of the 1905 Congress, p. 14.50 De Zuid-Afrikaan, 26 July 1904.51 De Goede Hoop (March 1909), p. 94; also ibid. (October 1908), p. 74; De Zuid-Afrikaan, 20 June 1907; ibid.,

1 August 1907.52 De Zuid-Afrikaan, 27 June 1908. This was not the first time that Dutch-Afrikaans men were publicly articulating

their ideas about women’s proper place. In the 1880s, when many Dutch-Afrikaans girls (from middle-class andwell-off farming families) were graduating from the new seminaries, and some opting for teaching or missionarycareers, DRC journals began copiously promoting an ideal of maternal piety. Articles asserting that obedienceto God entailed subservience to husbands also appeared. See du Toit, ‘ “Moedermeesteres” ’.

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opponents who would soon dominate every profession – the ‘angstige’ (fear-ful) prospect of equality for men and women would lead to ‘matschappelijke wanorde’(social chaos).53 An essay by the Christelike Jongelings Vereniging (Christian YoungMen’s Society) in the western Cape town of Worcester asked whether women should beallowed to speak in public – and answered ‘met nadruk neen en nogmaals neen’(emphatically no and yet again no).54 Churchmen also explained that female subordinationwas divinely ordained. One predikant explained the importance of biblical dictates ‘in eentijd levende, waarin de vrouw zich al meer en meer op elk gebied des levens wil latengelden’ (during times when women want to assert themselves more and more in every areaof life). Another discussed ‘vaderlijke heerschappij’ (fatherly authority), linking the divinewith men. For women, worshipping God entailed obedience to men – and silence inpublic.55

Speeches by the churchmen annually invited to the ACVV congress also reflected alarmat the actions of ‘new women’. Previously content to celebrate motherhood and women’sdomestic destiny, Rev Steytler (husband of a leading ACVV member) now enumerated forhis female audience those occupations not sanctioned by God – advocates, doctors,‘feministen’, public speakers, members of parliament and church functionaries of anydescription. Others pointedly addressed ACVV members ‘als moeders, niet als burger-essen’ (as mothers, not as female citizens) or reminded them that they were ‘geenzogenaamde moderne vrouwen’ (no so-called modern women) who worked to underminemen’s rights.56

How did the ACVV respond to such expressions of anxiety about female transgressionbeyond accepted boundaries? From 1907, Roos carefully positioned her organisation, andjustified its actions, against those of the stemregvrouens (suffragettes). Male opponents ofwomen’s suffrage first pointed with satisfaction to the silent, therefore consenting femalemajority. Very soon the ACVV could also be cited as proof that Afrikaans women did notwant to vote.57 At the 1907 congress, Elizabeth Roos dismissed the suffrage movement asforeign to Afrikaans women. She hoped that she spoke for everyone ‘wanneer ik beweer,dat wy als Afrikaanse vrouwen nog nimmer gevoeld hebben, dat wy aan banden zyn gelegd,of immer gesnakt hebben naar meer vryheid en macht’ (when I say that we as Afrikaanswomen have never yet felt that we are restricted, and have never yearned for more freedomand power).58

While men were at pains to demarcate female territory, Roos’s speeches at ACVVcongresses and ‘sisterly letters’ in the religious-cultural monthly, De Goede Hoop, alsocopiously explained the role of women in church and volk. At the 1910 congress, shewarned that these were times when the female sex increasingly wanted to stand on the sameplatform with men. ‘Ja, sommigen openbaren zelfs een sterke begeerte om de man voorbijte streven’ (Yes, some even reveal a strong desire to outdo men). Roos emphasised thatmodern education threatened to eradicate the dividing line between girls and boys. Mothershad to teach their daughters their true, domestic destiny, or future generations would nolonger be content to remain at home. And women’s true destiny, God-given and glorious,the sphere of duty in which they could exert a powerful moral influence, was ‘dit huis, ditliefelik huis’ (home, lovely home).59 From 1910, ideals of feminine domesticity also

53 De Goede Hoop (May 1908).54 De Zuid-Afrikaan, 12 December 1908.55 Het Gereformeerd Maandblad (December 1907).56 De Zuid-Afrikaan, 11 April 1907; 14 February 1907; 15 April 1909.57 Ibid., 15 April 1909; De Goede Hoop (September 1909), p. 66.58 CA, A1953, 3/2/1 (ACVV Congress Reports), 1907, p. 5.59 CA, A1953, 3/2/1), 1910. For a broader discussion of ACVV members’ attitudes, see du Toit, ‘Women, Welfare

and the Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism’.

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explicitly informed ACVV projects aimed at poorer whites. Roos explained that theorganisation should establish a ‘huishoudschool’ (house-keeping school) in order to teachgirls from poor families to be competent ‘huismoeders’ (house mothers).60

However, while the organisation distanced itself from the suffragettes, it also justifiedits actions to those who believed that women should not act in public. In these early yearsof the ACVV’s existence, Elizabeth Roos was acutely aware that it was moving onto newterrain – especially when it held public meetings. Against critics who objected to congresseswhere women formulated publicised ‘resolutions’ and made speeches, her defence held nofundamental challenge. Several years previously, when newspapers responded to thewomen’s protest meetings held across the Cape by proclaiming the moral force of‘Woman’s Voice’, Roos and other future ACVV leaders had been prominent speakers.Then, both women and men had not only expressed wonder at the sound of confident publicspeeches by ‘moeders’ (mothers), ‘dochters’ (daughters) and ‘zusters’ (sisters), but alsoemphasised that extraordinary times necessitated this action in defence of their children.61

The novelty of female public speakers had been subsumed in a discourse emphasising theirmaternal attributes and familial responsibility. Roos now made similar claims: post-warpoverty and dislocation forced female nationalists to step outside their homes and helprescue their people.62

Even so, the ACVV was outlining a legitimate place for women in public. In 1909, aportrait in De Goede Hoop did so with confidence. The woman in the photograph sits withher ringed hands clasped on her lap, her body turned sideways, her face to the camera. Theangled lighting accentuates and shadows her grave expression. A dark dress covers herbody. Its cut and complicated pleating emphasise shoulders and bosom, white frills encircleher throat. Above the picture, familial identity is spelt out in some detail: this is MrsMargaretha de Beer, born Bosman, wife of Reverend de Beer, mother to Miss E. de Beer(‘B.A.’). Below, political credentials are enumerated. Treasurer to the ACVV, de Beer wasan assertive nationalist ‘in word en daad’ (in word and deed), able public speaker at theerstwhile ‘groote vrouwen-vergaderingen … tegen de oorlog’ (great women’s meetingsagainst the war), ‘een vrouw wat vir niets terugdeinst, waar het de belangen van haar Taal,Natie of Kerk geldt’ (a woman who recoils at nothing when the interests of her Language,Nation and Church are at stake). But hers was an assertive and committed womanliness thatdid not transgress acceptable boundaries: ‘Met dat alles is zij een echt vrouwelike vrouw,en heeft geen simpathie met de suffragette-beweging’ (All in all, she is a truly femininewoman, and has no sympathy with the suffragette movement).63

While the ACVV was at pains to demarcate the limits of their departure from ‘tradition’,they also carefully – and crucially – maintained the organisation’s independent status. Thelate nineteenth-century missionary support societies and philanthropic ventures in whichRoos and many other ACVV leaders had learnt skills as organisers and public speakers hadalways been answerable to church bodies entirely controlled by men. Perhaps it was in thewomen-only wartime committees (to which leading ACVV members had belonged) thatDutch-Afrikaans women experienced the value of financial independence, because theirpost-war welfare societies, although frequently led by church ministers’ wives, maintainedseparate organisational structures. The ACVV alone decided on all practical and policymatters, including how to allocate the money generated by their fund-raising drives. Ofcourse, not only brothers in the church but also husbands at home were excluded from the

60 De Goede Hoop (February 1910), p. 188. The first school was established in 1913; by 1920, a third would openits doors.

61 Du Toit, ‘Women, Welfare and the Nurturing of Afrikaner Nationalism’, pp. 61–63.62 CA, A1953, 3/2/1 (ACVV Congress Reports), 1906.63 De Goede Hoop (July 1909).

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dominion that women were creating for themselves in a society that afforded wives veryfew chances to make their own decisions about financial and property matters.64 Indeed, adecade after its launch, the society was already accumulating property – not least thepremises of its ‘housekeeping’ schools for poor white girls. Some branches were uncom-fortable with this arrangement – but occasional suggestions in favour of submission to thesynod were neatly sidestepped by the ACVV executive. When, in 1916, a DRC represen-tative addressed an ACVV congress with a similar request, the women voted to support theDRC’s poor relief efforts, but declined to cede their organisation’s independence onfinancial matters.65

Volksmoeders and Nasionale Vrouens (Nationalist Women): ACVVLeadership and the Gender Discourse of the 1920s

The early 1920s heralded important shifts in the leadership of the ACVV as a newgeneration of women moved into prominence – women who would shape ACVV policy forthe next two decades. Some predikantsvroue and ACVV founders still held importantpositions. Roos, who withdrew from active work in the ACVV in 1921, handed leadershipof the Cape Town branch to Minni Roome (married to a prominent Cape Town DRCminister) and the presidency to Cradock’s formidable Elizabeth Jordaan (the wife of aretired farmer and a founding member) in 1923. Roome was vice-president in 1927 andheaded the ACVV from 1930, but never assumed Roos’s dominant role in formulatingpolicy. In fact, dynamic women less closely tied to the church – some with careers of theirown – were becoming more influential in the ACVV. Most prominent among them wasMaria Elizabeth Rothmann, better known as ‘M.E.R.’ to generations of readers of Afrikaansfiction, poetry and newspaper articles.66

While Roos and other ACVV founders debated their first constitution, Maria ElizabethOakshot, 29 years old, separated from her money-squandering husband but not yet rid ofhis surname, had supported her two children by teaching in her home town, Swellendam.As this English-educated university graduate and wagon-maker’s daughter later recalled, theSouth African war had profoundly shaped her political consciousness. When war broke out,her brother, already a Transvaal citizen, joined the Republican forces against the British. In1899, Rothmann (who had been teaching in Johannesburg) returned under military escortto the Colony. Under house-arrest in Swellendam as a suspected Boer sympathiser, shepainted the names of Boer Generals on hat ribbons. She had not previously questioned theBritish-oriented history she was taught at university – even during the war, she had writtenher diary in English. But in the context of post-war ethnic mobilisation amongstDutch-Afrikaans speakers Rothmann also began to articulate a new political identity.For the first sixteen or so years of the ACVV’s existence, Rothmann’s teachingcareer was complicated by occasional clashes with anglophone education officials.She joined the Afrikaanse Taal Vereniging (Afrikaans Language Society), and also

64 Roman-Dutch matrimonial law awarded husbands matrimonial power, which gave them ‘guardianship’ over theirwives, in terms of which they could deal with assets from joint estates as they pleased. See B. Clark, ‘Historyof the Roman-Dutch Law of Marriage from a Socio-Economic Perspective’, in D. P. Visser (ed), Essays on theHistory of Law (Cape Town, Juta, 1989), pp. 177–178.

65 CA, DRC, V21, 1/1/2 (ACVV Congress Minutes), 1910 and 1911; V21, 1/5 (ACVV Executive Minutes), 20February 1935.

66 M. E. Rothmann, My Beskeie Deel.’n Outobiografiese Vertelling (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1972). Rothmann’sparticipation in the Carnegie Commission of 1929–1932 has already been noted. Her life spanned a century andshe was a popular author of short stories and of books for children. The appearance of edited collections of lettersto family and friends in the 1970s and 1980s consolidated her popularity and reputation as a doyenne of Afrikaansliterature.

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published children’s verse and stories with new-found pleasure in the flexibility of hermoedertaal (mother tongue). Rothmann was one of many women who trekked to theunveiling of the Vrouwenmonument in 1913.67

It was in 1922, a year before Roos died, that Rothmann’s distinctive voice became afeature in the Afrikaans press. On Tuesday mornings, women readers of the National Partymouthpiece, Die Burger (The Citizen), could henceforth turn to their ‘own’ page – where‘M.E.R.’ not only promoted female Afrikaner nationalists’ party-political and welfareprojects, but also reflected upon gender roles in society. Now resident in Cape Town, this‘verplante boerevrou’ (transplanted farm-woman) launched a new career as journalist andactivist. Her Vrouesake (Women’s Issues) column provided extensive coverage of ACVVactivities – and Rothmann rapidly became a key member of the organisation.

Newly involved in its Cape Town branch and soon on the ACVV executive, she workedwith a number of women who would reinvigorate the organisation. At 47, she shared certainexperiences (a seminary education, war-time politicisation) with many ACVV foundingmembers – although her university degree, her status as a divorced woman with her owncareer and the fact that she never belonged to the DRC set her apart. Rothmann would soondevelop close ties with other prominent ACVV women, many newly involved at this time.Ida Theron, who also served on the central executive, never married and remained with theorganisation for many years as head of an ACVV ‘house-keeping’ school. E. C. van derLingen, another university graduate, was an active and vocal Cape Town executivemember. Anna Geyer, wife of Die Burger’s sub-editor, was also a dynamic and influentialmember. Although Cradock’s Jordaan would head the organisation for several years, thesewestern Cape women were soon influential – and consolidated their position when CapeTown predikantsvrou, Minni Roome, replaced Jordaan. Officially, the ACVV eschewedparty politics and rather held prayer meetings for the unification of the volk. In 1922,however, several prominent Cape Town ACVV members, including Geyer, Rothmann andvan der Lingen, were founding members of a new, party-political women’s organisation, theCape Province’s Nasionale Vroue Party (NVP).

Rothmann’s predecessor in Die Burger of the late 1910s had styled herself a preserverof the ‘old values’ and never broached political or contentious issues.68 Like her contempo-raries in cultural and women’s magazines, Rothmann occasionally contributed to theconstruction of a modern, Afrikaans feminine fashion through essays on, say, the phenom-enon of ‘verbygaande modes’ (passing fashions) or the dubious attraction of ‘nudestockings’.69 Apparently, her minimal interest in fashion did not include the ‘voortrekker’dress patterns promoted in Die Boerevrouw – the domestic skills promoted in this recentlylaunched women’s magazine were also mostly relegated to another part of Die Burger.70

Rothmann’s Vrouesake page claimed other subjects as appropriate material for femalediscussion. Writing ‘soos’ n vrou’ (as/like a woman), guest writer E. C. van der Lingenasserted that the press failed to represent ‘al ’n nasie se werksaamhede en hoedanighede …

67 Rothmann, My Beskeie Deel, pp. 96–154.68 Die Burger, 12 May 1917 and 2 July 1917.69 Die Burger, 31 May 1922; 14 April 1925. An interesting variation was her discussion on ‘Klasse-onderskeiding.

’n anti-mode praatjie’ (Class division. An anti-fashion talk), Die Burger, 27 November 1926.70 Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity’, discusses how Die Boerevrou, launched and edited by Mabel Malherbe

from 1919, shaped and popularised a discourse in which notions of home, house and household featuredprominently. The magazine combined explanations of Afrikaans women’s cultural and ideological task with apervasive and systematic construction of a radicalised Afrikaans domesticity. Articles on beauty and fashion,architecture and interior decorating sought to transform readers’ everyday experience into an affirmation ofAfrikaner culture. Malherbe participated in the invention of Voortrekker tradition – urging women to wear‘Voortrekker dresses’ at national festivals. Hofmeyr, ‘Building a Nation from Words’, also provides invaluablediscussion on the construction of Afrikaner femininity. See du Toit, ‘Women, Welfare and the Nurturing ofAfrikaner Nationalism’, for a more extensive discussion of Afrikaans women’s magazines of the 1920s.

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in geen koerant kry ons ’n weerspieeling van wat in die gees van die vrou van Suid-Afrikaaangaan nie’ (all the activities and concerns of a nation … in no paper do we find areflection of the spirit of the South African woman).71 Van der Lingen was referring tonewspapers’ inadequate coverage of women’s public activities and interests – she proceededto discuss the work of various women’s organisations.

From the outset, women’s party-political activities featured prominently. In fact,Rothmann’s ideas about women and politics contrasted sharply with the viewpointsexpressed by Roos only a few years before. Careful justifications of why women werepublicly active were replaced by an impatient dismissal of conservatism:

Die mense wat meen dat die vrou se werk by die sorg vir die man in die huis beperk behoortte wees erken dat dit tog niks help dat hulle hulle stelling neerle nie; die vrouens organiseertog buitekant en pak volksake aan.(Those who think women’s work should be limited to looking after their husbands at homethemselves acknowledge that saying this makes no difference; regardless of this, the womenorganise outside and tackle issues pertaining to the volk.)72

Rothmann’s original brief – as she explained sardonically – had not included writing aboutpolitics. (‘En Mevrou, tog nie politiek nie!’/And Madam, please, no politics!) But women’sentry into party politics made this impossible. ‘Kan ons nog in die vroue-kolomme buitendie politiek bly? En hoe sal ons maak nou dat dit eleksietyd is? … gaan ons werklik sobuiten die stryd bly as wat ons voorgee?’ (Can we still ignore politics in the women’scolumns? And what will we do now that it is election time? Will we really stay as removedfrom the struggle as we pretend to do?) Unlike the previous generation of ACVVleadership, Rothmann challenged the distinction between party-political and welfare work.She pointed to the inevitably political – and nationalist-nature of Afrikaans women’sphilanthropy:

Die verafskude politiek is tog maar niks as volksake nie … en daar is baie volksake wat onsvrouens nou al met ywer studeer. Die ACVV en sulke liggame sorg daarvoor. Die ACVV saldit miskien nie besef nie, maar hulle is die laaste sestien jaar besig om die Afrikaner-vrouensop te lei in niks minder as die politiek … .(The despised politics is in fact nothing other than matters of national interest … And ourwomen are already busily studying matters of interest to the volk. The ACVV and similarorganisations see to that. The ACVV may perhaps be unaware of this, but for the last sixteenyears it has educated women in nothing less than politics …)73

On Rothmann’s page, a range of issues pertaining to welfare, the economy and politicswere claimed as vrouesake. Political know-how (‘Wat maak die ministers?’ What do theministers do?) and discussions on education for underprivileged Afrikaans children featuredfar more prominently than fashion. Her support for the ACVV was reflected in frequentarticles on poverty in Cape Town. Above all, she wrote as a committed Nasionale vrou(Nationalist woman): she copiously reported and explained the NVP’s activities, and oftensought to give direction to NVP policy. She paid particular attention to efforts to encouragereading amongst Afrikaans-speakers. A founding member of the (female) ‘Handhawers’(Upholders) group – who promoted the use of Afrikaans in local business establishments– Rothmann also promoted their determined efforts to have Cape Town shopkeepers serveAfrikaans-speakers in their own language.74

Vrouesake reflected a broad interest in women’s position, public activities and political

71 Die Burger, 26 August 1924.72 Ibid., 2 June 1925.73 Ibid., 15 April 1924.74 Ibid., 4 August 1925; 14 April 1925; 15 July 1924; 30 March 1926; 19 February 1924; 6 January 1925; 14 April

1925; 16 May 1925; 12 January 1926.

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attitudes. Rothmann discussed women’s role in society in such diverse essays as ‘Hoe vaardie vrou in die politiek?’ (How are women doing in politics?), ‘Die vrou van sake’ (Thebusiness woman), ‘Boerevrouens op skoolrade’ (Farm women on school councils) and‘Vroue as predikante’ (Women as ministers of the church).75 Throughout the 1920s, shealso published investigative pieces on local attitudes about women’s suffrage, and featureson ‘die vrouebeweging’ (the women’s movement) in countries where women’s right to votehad apparently given them more power to influence state policy: ‘Dis regtig om oor na tedink, watter toestand in ander lande deur die vrouens verander was, en hoe verreikendhulle invloed is’ (It really gives food for thought, how women in other countries have beenable to change conditions, and how far-reaching their influence is). If at first she preferrednot to emphasise her own pro-suffrage views in Vrouesake, Rothmann always covered thesuffrage debate with the implicit assumption that it was simply a matter of time beforewomen had the vote. As female suffrage gained increasing acceptance in the NVP of themid-1920s, Rothmann’s own pro-suffrage views were openly advocated and explained.

In this respect, and like most Afrikaans women addressing a female audience onpolitical matters, Rothmann wrote in a pervasively gender-specific way, characterising theNational Party as ‘die mansparty’ (the men’s party) and discussing the issue of the dayamongst ‘ons vrouens’ (us women). But she was unusual in her frequent, publicly expressedand often perceptive comments on the gender dynamics between male and female activistsas women blurred the boundaries of ‘separate spheres’. When the NVP was launched, sheemphasised the need for (and women’s commitment to) cooperation between the sexes.Whether in separate organisational structures or ‘met die mans saam in een party …wanneer vrouestemreg kom, ons en hulle doel is darem in enig geval, saamwerk’ (togetherwith the men in one party … when women have the vote, our purpose and theirs is in anycase, cooperation).76 She also insisted on the good relations between Afrikaner men andwomen. But as she explained in 1924, in spite of their good intentions, men failed tounderstand the ‘plan’ of cooperation and to accept women who acted as their equal:

Hulle beskou ons nog as ‘n ander soort mens – dit bewys hulle deur ons gedurig te prys, ente vertel, en herhaal, en weer te vertel, hoe goed en knap ons is, en hoeveel beter ashulle … Prys die mans vir mekaar ook so? … Dit is natuurlik uiters aangenaam om al die mooiwaardering te hoor; mens voel so gestreel en so goed en so nobel en so ideaal; maar as jy bydie huis kom – waar dit nog maar net so staan soos altyd – dan weet jy nie eintlik nie.(They still regard us as a different sort of human being, and they prove this by constantlypraising us, and telling us, and repeating, and telling us again, how good and bright we are, andhow much better than themselves … Do the men also praise each other like this? … It is ofcourse extremely pleasant to hear all the lovely appreciation; one feels so flattered and so good,so noble and so ideal; but when you get home – where nothing has changed – then you don’treally know.)77

While Rothmann chided women for their ‘onnodige eerbied’ (unnecessary respect) formen’s political knowledge (they shouldn’t take over from men but could also learn toparticipate), she also criticised men for their ‘vriendelike minagting’ (friendly contempt) offemale expertise.78 Not surprisingly for a woman who liked to philosophise on male/femalerelations, Rothmann found much to admire in Olive Schreiner. Afrikaans women – withtheir growing political consciousness and keen eye for injustice – could identify strongly,suggested Rothmann, with this champion of victimised women.79

75 Ibid., 29 December 1925; 14 April 1923; 27 April 1926; 15 May 1928.76 Ibid., 9 May 1922.77 Die Burger, 15 April 1924.78 Ibid.79 Ibid., 13 January 1925.

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Rothmann’s interest in women’s rights was also firmly circumscribed by the preroga-tives of ethnic nationalism. For all her interest in women’s lot and admiration for Schreiner,the concerns of a racially defined volk came first. From the mid-1920s, Vrouesake coveredsuch burning issues for Afrikaner nationalists as efforts to legislate against ‘onsedelikeverkeer tussen blanke en naturelle … ons vrouens voel baie sterk oor hierdie saak’(immoral intercourse between whites and natives … we women feel very strongly about thisissue).80 In copious detail, Rothmann explained the views of National Party leader, Hertzog,on the danger that enfranchised blacks in the Cape posed for the volk. Nasionale vrouens,‘Nationalist women’, accepted that the ‘Segregation Question’ was reason enough topostpone women’s right to vote. White women needed the vote, but black women (‘dieKaffervrou’) with votes would pose serious problems for ‘die verhouding tussen blank enswart’ (the relationship between white and black).81

Brink’s work pointed to the socio-economic context that prompted writers such asPostma to articulate a fundamentally conservative notion of idealised motherhood. Thematernalist discourse of Cape Town’s ACVV leaders was also shaped by an acuteawareness of urbanisation and how growing numbers of working-class women earned aliving outside their homes. For Rothmann and her colleagues, the lot of white Afrikaansworking women was an urgent question for Afrikaner nationalism. As she explained, ‘diegrootste verandering van toestande al ooit bekend’ (the greatest societal change everknown) was that ‘meer as die helfte van die wereld se werk gly al sekerder en sekerder indie vrouens se hande. Hulle moet die mensdom groot maak, en moet hulle ook omgord omuit te gaan en kos te soek’ (more than half the world’s work is sliding into women’s hands.They must raise humanity, and must also gird themselves to go out and look for food).82

One of the appropriate ways for poor women to earn money was through domestic work,and the ACVV’s house-keeping schools remained an important aspect of their workthroughout the 1920s. As Rothmann bluntly reminded readers, ‘ons maak hulle groot virbediendes’ (we are rearing them as servants).83 But while the ACVV accepted that ‘onsmeisies van buite verplig is om huisdiens in die stede te soek’ (our rural girls are forced tolook for domestic work in the cities), it was increasingly reluctant to place the youngwomen in urban positions because of perceived dangers.

Rothmann argued that uncaring employers forced young Afrikaner women ‘na die standen klas van die kleurling’ (into the station and class of coloureds), through equal pay andtreatment. When describing an encounter with a young, working-class couple, ‘Afrikaners’

80 ‘Die Ontug-Wetsontwerp’, Die Burger, 11 May 1926.81 Ibid. To some extent, Afrikaner women’s maternalist rhetoric also resembled that of their white middle-class

contemporaries in South Africa and elsewhere. P. Scully, ‘White Maternity and Black Infancy: The Rhetoric ofRace in the South African Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1895–1930’, in I. Fletcher, L. Mayhall and P. Levine(eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (London and New York, Routledge,2000), p. 74, argues that the publications of South African suffragists – most of whom were English and stronglyidentified with a British milieu – were ‘overwhelmingly preoccupied with a white female constituency’. Accordingto Scully, ‘the absence of explicit discussions about the place of Africans in the colony, and the almost total erasureof black women as candidates for enfranchisement, also helped construct the idea of women’s suffrage withinthe discourse of the suffrage movement, as a white narrative, a tale of white female access to the vote, and tothe state’. See also E. Boris, ‘The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the“Political” ’, in S. Koven and S. Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins ofWelfare States (New York, Routledge, 1993). Boris compares the divergent projects of black and white femaleactivists in the United States. Both groups extended women’s political role in terms of discourses that exaltedwomen’s capacity to mother. Both relied on images of motherhood as altruistic, nurturing and protective that were‘embodied in the dominant male-supremacist and racist culture and … law’. But in the maternalist discourse ofmost white reformers (as with that of Afrikaner women), ‘within the word “mother”… lurked the referent“white” … ’.

82 Die Burger, 10 May 1922.83 University of Stellenbosch Document Centre, M.E. Rothmann Collection, 55.ko.8C (‘Vrouesake’ Cutting

Collection), ‘’n Vroue-beskouing van die Plan’, c.1924.

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who sat chatting with each other at Cape Town station, she articulated the fear that‘Afrikaners’ were forgetting that they belonged to an exclusively white and culturallydistinct volk. It was particularly the young woman, whom Rothmann took for a domesticworker, who attracted her concerned attention:

… die kind se taal, en haar hele denkwyse, was die van ’n baie minderwaardige klas kleurling;Dit was om van te gril – so grof, so lelik – so tipies kleurling; en so ook word haar helehouding. Ons het ’n woord ‘meidagtig’ – ek hou nie daarvan nie, want ek weet van aias wathulle fyn gedra; maar dit was wat daardie kind was.(The child’s language, her whole way of thought, was that of a coloured of very inferior class.It made one shudder – so rough, so ugly, so typically coloured, and so also her whole bearing.We have a word – meidagtig – I don’t like it, because I know ayahs that carry themselvesgraciously, but that is what this child was like.)84

Rothmann was voicing concerns that were repeatedly spelt out in Vrouesake and byother ACVV members elsewhere. Afrikaner culture, defined in middle-class terms,belonged to ‘whites’ in the logic of the racial, ethnic politics of Afrikaner nationalists – andthe uncertain edges of whiteness had to be assiduously protected. The threat was poorerwhites ‘forgetting’ their true, Afrikaner identity, ‘losing’ a natural race-consciousness andassimilating with their black inferiors. Rothmann also shared the concern of many Afrikanernationalists when she went on to deny that ‘sommige Afrikaners klaar vas is in ’n klas wathulle heeltemal apart stel’ (some Afrikaners already belong permanently to a class thatplaces them entirely apart). This could not be: ‘Nee, die skeiding is net tydelik: dis nieingebore nie. Teenoor die gevalle wat wegsak kan jy stel die wat opklim.’ (No, the divisionis only temporary, it is not inborn. Against those who sink away, lost, you should placethose who improve their status).85

Cape Town’s ACVV women were also acutely aware that many young women were notkeen to enter service and were, instead, opting for factory work. Van der Lingen stated thisas an incontrovertible fact with an assertive exasperation very different from Roos’s carefulstatements some ten or twelve years earlier – and that perhaps referred both to womenopting for factory work and middle-class women organising to deal with the attendantproblems:

Om te se dat die vrou se plek in die huis is – laat my koud – as daar soveel vroue en dogtersself moet buite die huis werk om ’n dak oor hulle hoof te kan hou. Ons moet die feit onder dieoe sien, dat ekonomiese toestande sedert die laaste twintig jaar ook in ons land baie veranderhet, dit help nie om te se dat die vroue so sleg is nie – hulle wil nie trou nie – hulle wil niehuiswerk doen nie – hulle wil nie families he nie … As ons sien dat dinge verkeerd is, moet onsprobeer om reg te maak, en nie sleg maak nie.(To say that woman’s place is in the home – leaves me cold – when so many women and girlsare forced to work outside of the home in order to keep a roof over their heads. We must acceptthat in the last twenty years economic conditions have changed much in our country, nothingwill be achieved by saying that women are bad – they don’t want to marry – they don’t wantto do housework – they don’t want families … If we see that things are going wrong, we musttry to address the issues instead of criticising.)86

Van der Lingen made clear that this vrouesaak was ultimately a volksaak. Sheemphasised the common interests of all Afrikaner women. Although her article was called‘Wat is ons werk werd?’ (What is the value of our work?), she was specifically addressing‘ons vroue en moeders’ (us women and mothers) of the Afrikaner middle-class in order toconvince them that, unless they helped the ‘meisies van ons volk’ (girls of our nation) who

84 Die Burger, 9 June 1924. Meidaglig may be translated as ‘like a servant girl’ but has derogatory, racist connotationsin the South African context.

85 Ibid.86 Ibid., 14 April 1925.

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worked in factories, they would be unwilling or unable to contribute to the ‘moral’ andeconomic well-being of the Afrikaner people: ‘of meisies in fabrieke en winkels siel enliggaam aanmekaar kan hou – en ordentlik bly is ’n saak wat al meer en meer die aandagvan ons vroue en moeders moet trek – ons moet die ding ondersoek’ (whether girls workingin factories and shops are able to keep body and soul together and to stay respectable is anissue that must increasingly occupy the attention of us women and mothers – we mustinvestigate the matter).87 The ACVV did much to research and publicise low wages,exploitative piecework systems, long hours and dismal working conditions in Cape Town’sfactories. Its spokeswomen echoed the anti-capitalist sentiments expressed by otherAfrikaner nationalists during this period. As Rothmann wrote in Vrouesake, the machinesin front of which the workers toiled ‘om die sakke van die fabriekhouers te vul’ (to fill thepockets of the factory owners), were oiled and cared for. ‘Maar die masjiene van vlees enbloed, wat van hulle?’ (But the machines of flesh and blood, what of them?) But the ACVVwas consistently intent on the fate of those they saw as eie (their own) – in thisorganisation’s vocabulary, helping women to stay respectable meant ‘keeping’ them blank.

By the late 1920s, the ACVV was also reviewing its platteland activities – in thisrespect, Rothmann was also a major force behind efforts to move beyond the piece-mealhand-outs that comprised much rural branch work to an organised campaign that wouldimprove the lot of impoverished, white, rural women. As organising secretary from 1928,she traversed the rural Cape, advising often isolated branches on ACVV policy andresearching what she soon identified as a major vrouesaak. She argued that the lack ofmodernised maternity care for many rural white women, particularly the poor, caused muchsuffering. Under Rothmann’s guidance, the ACVV raised funds for maternity clinics,employed nurses and campaigned for state funding for their scheme.88

Rothmann not only expressed strong views on the inevitability of Afrikaans women’spolitical participation and on male Afrikaner nationalists’ inability to accept women as theirequals. By the mid-1920s, she also openly supported female suffrage. She and hercolleagues were vocal in the face of what they saw as an urgent task for Afrikanernationalism – rescuing the ‘Afrikaner’ poor from forgetfulness of their identity – and madeno apologies for their public action. But what they offered were the variations of assertivewomen on the volksmoeder theme. Speaking to fellow NVP members in Die Burger,Rothmann emphasised Afrikaans women’s ‘onafhanklikheidsgevoel’ (independent spirit).As men’s partners, their primary role was related to the family – a volksaak (national issue)often undervalued and unrecognised. NVP members’ adoption of the designation ‘burgeres’(citizeness/female citizen) indicated that, for them, women’s civic identity was based on anessential difference from men. Moreover, Rothmann simultaneously and primarily spoke asa mother working for the good of the volk:

nou, meer as ooit te vore, moet ons vrouens kennis opdoen, sodat ons goed en verstandig kanoordeel, en regtig ons volk kan dien, as burgeresse sowel as (in die eerste plek!) Moeders.(now, more than ever, we women must educate ourselves, so that we can judge well andsensibly and really serve our people, as female citizens as well as (in the first place!)Mothers.)89

Together with other prominent female Afrikaner nationalists, Rothmann constructed amaternalist discourse that drew on mainstream notions of women’s primary role as mother

87 Ibid.88 See M. du Toit, ‘ “Dangerous Motherhood”: Maternity Care and the Gendered Construction of Afrikaner Identity,

1904–1939’, in V. Fildes, L. Marks and H. Marland (eds), Women and Children First: International Maternaland Infant Welfare, 1870–1945 (London, Routledge, 1992).

89 Die Burger, 29 December 1925.

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and did not fundamentally challenge the idea of separate spheres.90 However, this ‘languageof social housekeeping’ claimed responsibility for non-familial social spaces, extendingwomen’s mothering role beyond the home to forge ‘a new, more inclusive definition of thepolitical’91 and claiming some direct power for women in a redefined public arena. WhenRothmann asserted that ‘as jy by die huis kom’ (when you get home), and in spite of men’spraises, nothing had changed, she spoke in metaphoric terms. Afrikaner women participatedin a distinct female political culture that ‘extolled the virtues of domesticity whilesimultaneously legitimating women’s public relationships to politics and the state, tocommunity, workplace and marketplace’.92 If women in the nineteenth-century UnitedStates had evolved a ‘distinct female political culture … based on the ideology of domestic-ity’ and involving ‘continual expansion of the environs of the “home” ’, a similar dynamicwas evident amongst female Afrikaner nationalists.93 As Rothmann explained, ‘onsvrouens’ (we women) were newly aware that ‘die Staat, soos die huis’ (the State, like thehome), could become very disorderly. ‘En ons ly daaronder … en ons wil baie graag aandie kant maak’ (And we suffer because of this … and we very much want to tidy up).

Conclusion

Now that a selection of the words of Roos, Rothmann and other ACVV women has beenextracted from the archived papers of the ACVV, it should be clear how inaccurate are theassumptions that these were ‘man-made women’ and that female activity contributing to thespread of Afrikaner nationalism was confined to a narrowly circumscribed ‘domestic’ space.From the earliest years of post-South African war Afrikaner nationalist activity, Dutch-Afrikaans women participated in the construction and articulation of a gendered Afrikanernationalism. Even before Stockenstrom and other male writers fashioned a coherentvolksmoeder discourse rooted in popular histories of the Trek and war against the British,women steeped in an older, gendered, religious discourse wove this into a newer, nationalistpattern. Women of the first generation who belonged to the ACVV were not passiverecipients of a male-constructed discourse. Their efforts to blend older notions of maternalpiety with ideas about women’s duties as members of a racially, linguistically andreligiously defined volk coincided with (in fact, marginally preceded) both the activities ofthe cultural nationalist societies in which men took the lead and the first significant publiccampaign to commemorate women as victims of the South African war. Roos championed‘tradition’ and the adherence to domestic duties. She carefully distanced her organisationfrom the activity of stemregvrouens (suffragettes). But she also defended the public spaceclaimed by the ACVV. Most crucially, the ACVV broke with previous practice andestablished a women’s society that was entirely separate from the DRC’s all-malehierarchy. Close ties with the Church and a carefully judged public deference to male and

90 See, for example, the discussion by Kruger, ‘Gender, Community and Identity’, of Volksmoeder discourseelaborated in Die Boerevrou during the 1920s. While editor Mabel Malherbe avoided discussion on women’ssuffrage and party-political activities (despite being a founder member of the Transvaal National Party’s women’swing in 1915), she was also active in the ACVV’s sister organisation in the Transvaal and publicised women’sphilanthropic ventures. She published extensively on issues such as ‘volksgesondheid’ (people’s health) and, whilstemphasising women’s role as ‘queen of the house’, also sanctioned their public participation in matters of welfare,health and education as extensions of their mothering role.

91 S. Koven and S. Michel, ‘Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France,Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920’, American Historical Review, 95, 4 (1990), p. 1079;E. Boris, ‘The Power of Motherhood’, in Koven and Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World, p. 214.

92 Koven and Michel, ‘Womanly Duties’, p. 1079.93 P. Baker, ‘The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920’, American

Historical Review, 89, 3 (1984), pp. 631–637.

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ecclesiastical authority were matched by clear-cut independence on all matters of finance,property and policy.

Rothmann was certainly an exceptional individual who voiced analyses of genderpolitics within the Afrikaner nationalist movement with particular irony and insight. But shewas an eloquent and important member of a larger, influential group of nationalist womenwho came into their own during the 1920s and led party-political, cultural and philanthropicorganisations at this time. Rothmann and her colleagues embraced motherhood whilstseeking to extend their sphere of action in order to participate actively in formulating andexecuting a social policy entrenching racial privilege. In failing to realise the extent ofAfrikaner women’s conscious participation in the nationalist cause, historians have alsofailed to understand the extent of Afrikaner women’s part in building a political movementseeking to entrench white (and Afrikaans) privilege and power. This was certainly a societyin which manspolitiek dominated – even in the 1930s, after the franchise was extended towhite women, few entered formal politics and women’s societies exerted little direct poweron legislative change. Nevertheless, assertions that Afrikaner nationalism’s ‘hegemonicgender identity’ was ‘male’ must be tempered by considering the impact of the women’sdominion of politicised vrouesake. Writing about the gendered nature of nationalism innineteenth-century Bengal, Chatterjee reminds us that the field of discourse is always ‘oneof contention, peopled by several subjects, several consciousnesses’. Discourse is

situated within fields of power, not only constituting that field but also constituted by it.Dominance here cannot exhaust the claims to subjectivity, for even the dominated must alwaysretain an aspect of autonomy. Otherwise, power would cease to be a relation; it would nolonger be constituted by struggle.94

Chatterjee was considering ‘the trouble with their voices’ with regard to a nationalistmovement and its ‘new patriarchy’ that left much fainter and far more tenuous traces offemale autonomous subjectivity than did early twentieth-century Afrikaner nationalism.Indeed, consideration of the ACVV’s history gives substance to McClintock’s unsubstan-tiated assertion that the Volksmoeder ideology was changing, dynamic, ‘rife with paradox’,and ‘under constant contest by men and women’.95 This article has demonstrated howarchival research on the activities of female Afrikaner nationalists might prompt a revisedunderstanding of the gendered nature of Afrikaner nationalism. Indeed, established explana-tions of the trajectory of Afrikaner nationalism’s rise to power must be reconsidered withattention to women’s part in building cross-class alliances and the roots of racialisedpatronage in a women’s dominion of social work.

MARIJKE DU TOIT

Historical Studies, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Natal Durban, Durban 4041,South Africa. E-mail: Dutoitm@nu.ac.za

94 P. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 137.95 McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 378.

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