Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

with contempt the language he or she spoke. British teachers, by contrast, were inclined to be status conscious and were quick to disparage Afrikaans.92

      From the 1890s education for Afrikaner girls made rapid strides. Growing numbers enrolled in secondary schools, and by the end of the century some were going on to college where they received BA degrees. With men reluctant to become teachers, teaching was one of the few careers open to women. In 1905 the senior official of the Cape education department reported: ‘In truth it has become the proper thing among the fairly well-to-do farming class that the daughters of the family on completing their education should go out and teach for three or four years.’93

      Yet another development was the rise of nationalist organisations and publications. It is instructive to conceive of nationalism as built on the ideas of a patriarchal family and a fraternity or brotherhood of men. In this scheme of thought the traditions of the ‘forefathers’ are passed down through the generations to young men, who are deemed to be the heroic protectors of women and of the purity of the nation. Women were seen as the reproducers of the nation and the protectors of tradition and morality. Men had the obligation to shield them from public controversy and embarrassment, while women had to devote themselves to the welfare of their husbands and children.94

      The architects of the first Afrikaner political movement were nationalists in this mould. It was led by S.J. du Toit, minister in the town of Paarl in the western Cape, who, together with seven other men, founded the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaners (GRA) in 1875. The GRA published the Afrikaans paper Di Patriot and several Afrikaans books, including a history and a volume of poems. From the outset Di Patriot refused to publish poems submitted in Afrikaans by women, which raises the question whether the decision was informed primarily by misogyny or the special circumstances in which the GRA operated.

      Misogyny characterised the thinking of Du Toit, who wrote the following, citing Nehemiah 13 verses 23–28:

      Seduction and degeneration usually slips in by means of the woman. Virtually every heresy counts women among its first adherents and most fiery disseminators. When they could not eradicate our nationality openly in our church and the state they directed their fire at our families. They took our daughters and educated them in American and other schools, in order to denationalise the future mothers of our generation and their children.95

      Du Toit was influenced by conservative Protestant Dutch literature of the nineteenth century which was suffused with old-fashioned biblical misogyny.96 However, his comments must also be seen against the background of the GRA’s objectives of elevating Afrikaans to the level of a literary language and of rehabilitating lower-income white Afrikaans-speakers. Poems sent from Huguenot Seminary in the neighbouring town of Wellington were unlikely to serve any of these purposes. Almost all the girls there came from upper-class homes. At best they considered Afrikaans as a medium for light-hearted fun; at worst they saw it as an impure language fit only for working-class or Coloured people.

      The manifestation of an aggressive British imperialism in the Jameson Raid and the South African War shocked Cape Afrikaner girls who attended English-medium private schools. Among them were Petronella van Heerden, who would become a physician and feminist, and M.E. Rothmann, who would later write under the name MER. Later in life they each gave an account of how they suddenly discovered that underlying the actions of imperialist politicians was a profound contempt for ‘Boers’ or Afrikaners. Both of them turned to a variant of Afrikaner nationalism that rejected the misogyny of Du Toit and some of his allies.

      During the South African War some 10 000 Cape Afrikaners became rebels by joining the republican forces, but the Afrikaner men were quiescent. It was Afrikaner women who organised and attended the fourteen protest meetings in the Colony that took place during the war at which imperialism was denounced. After the war the women regrouped first. Well before men founded the first cultural organisations, they established welfare organisations to address the needs of poor Afrikaners. These were the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging in the Cape Colony, the Oranje Vrouevereniging in the Orange River Colony, and the Suid-Afrikaanse Vrouefederasie in the Transvaal Colony. Women ran these organisations entirely separately from the Dutch Reformed Church’s all-male hierarchy.97

      Women and the vote

      Although Afrikaner women held a strong and secure place in the family, particularly on the farms, their public position was weakened by a long history of discrimination. From the beginning of European settlement at the Cape a gendered definition of political rights and offices applied, with access to office in the state and church open only to European men. This continued under British rule. Women were excluded from the vote in both the liberal Cape constitution of 1853 and the constitutions of the Boer republics.

      By the end of the century opposition to women’s rights in South Africa had grown. It was probably a response to growing assertiveness by women in other parts of the Empire. In 1898 laughter greeted a suggestion in the Cape Parliament that women be allowed to vote.98 Paul Kruger never contemplated enfranchising Afrikaner women, thus creating a clear electoral majority, which would have been a masterstroke against the efforts of Milner to provoke war. John X. Merriman, a leading liberal politician, made what a historian called the ‘characteristic assertion’ that women were quite unfit to exercise the vote.99 Of all the leading politicians President Steyn stood virtually alone as a strong and outspoken champion of the vote for white women.100

      By the turn of the century Merriman made an intriguing statement: ‘Oddly enough in South Africa the [Afrikaner] women have always exercised a great influence. I say “oddly” because they are so utterly opposed to the modern view of “women’s rights”.’101 By ‘the modern view’ he meant the views of the suffragette movement, which originated in Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Frustrated by pervasive gender discrimination, the suffragettes formed a mass movement of predominantly urban, middle-class women to win equal rights and opportunities for women.

      Very few Afrikaner women joined when English-speaking women in South Africa began to campaign for the enfranchisement of women early in the twentieth century. For a start they suspected that the suffragettes in South Africa were above all interested in projecting the extension of the vote to women as part and parcel of the programme of imperial reform which had served as a justification for the war in South Africa.

      Afrikaner women only began pressing for the vote in the late 1920s. Both Olive Schreiner and MER, who had become one of the first full-time social workers, made revealing comments about the reason why women in some societies refrain from insisting on political rights for their own sex. After telling the story of an illuminating conversation she had with a traditional African woman who had stoically endured polygamy and other disadvantages, Schreiner recorded this important observation: no women of any race or class would ever rise in a revolt or attempt to bring about a revolutionary adjustment to their situation in their community while the community’s welfare required their submission. That stance would only end when changing conditions in a society made women’s acquiescence in the discrimination against them ‘no longer necessary or desirable’.102

      In 1922 MER wrote that Afrikaner women believed there were greater priorities than getting the vote. Of overriding importance were regaining the freedom of Afrikaners as a ‘conquered people’, the taalstryd, and addressing the impoverishment, ‘neglect and degeneration [of Afrikaner people]’. The vote for women did not appear to be an important factor in addressing these grave crises. MER added that the campaign to enfranchise women had been imported from Britain, and that in South Africa it had been propagated by English-speaking women who ‘cared little about the issues of vital concern to Afrikaners’.103

      Afrikaner women refused to join the suffragette movement in great numbers but many gave enthusiastic support to associations for women’s rights founded within the framework of the Afrikaner nationalist movement. After the Vroue Nasionale Party had been formed its mouthpiece, Die Burgeres, remarked that the NP leadership had not anticipated the force it would unleash when it called on women to organise their own political party.104

      In 1930 white women were enfranchised, but this important step was soon eclipsed by Fusion in 1934 and the rise of a radical Afrikaner nationalist movement dominated by men. Men now led the struggle for the advancement of Afrikaans