A cake of soap: The Volksmoeder ideology and the Afrikaner women's campaign for the vote
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Date
1988-03-23
Authors
Vincent, L.
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Abstract
The 1920s witnessed a great volume of activity associated with the women's suffrage campaign
in South Africa. Existing women's organisations added the demand for the vote to their
programmes and new organisations were formed with suffrage as their exclusive goal. This
campaign is usually associated with the English-speaking women of the country. Cherryl Walker,
for example, in her article on "The Women's Suffrage Movement" asserts that "its leaders were
not rural or Afrikaner, but characteristically middle-class, urban and English-speaking". Walker
sees Afrikaner women as firmly under the sway of the patriarchal ideology of the Dutch
Reformed Church and "content to exercise their power indirectly, without questioning the
principle of male hegemony" (1). Lou-Marie Kruger, in her study of the magazine, Die Boerevrou,
finds that the issue of female suffrage was hardly ever discussed in Die Boerevrou and concludes
from this that Afrikaner women played no part in the campaign (2). Marijke du Toit's work on the
Afrikaner Christelike Vroue Vereniging (the Afrikaner Christian Women's Association) comes
to a similar conclusion. She argues that sporadic reports of militant suffragette action in Britain
made little impact in South Africa and that, for the most part, Afrikaner women agreed that
"unbiblical suffragettes" threatened domestic life (3).
This paper challenges the perception of the suffrage campaign as a movement of Englishspeaking,
middle-class, urban women. It argues that Afrikaner women played a significant role
in what was referred to at the time as one of the most controversial issues ever to have been dealt
with in the South African Legislative Assembly. Leading Afrikaner women campaigned
vociferously for their own enfranchisement. In order to do so, they had to challenge existing
Afrikaner nationalist ideas about the proper role of women in society. As the title of the paper
suggests, Afrikaner women employed the language of home-making and motherhood as a means
of conferring legitimacy on their campaign for citizenship. The title is taken from an article
which appeared in the suffrage magazine, The Flashlight in July 1930. In this article, Mrs M.
Moldenhauer described the newly-won suffrage as "a cake of soap" which women would use to
"clean up the dirty places of the country, and lighten darkness wherever it is possible" (4).
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 23 March 1998