The South African lady and Die Boerevrou : a comparison of the race and gender discourse within popular white women’s reading in South Africa, 1920-1929

Abstract

This study explores the negotiation of race and gender discourse as refracted through the popular reading of white South African women in the 1920s. It explores the dominant ideological preoccupations of the decade through an analysis of reading cultures as exemplified in women’s magazines and the novels reviewed therein. The relationship between gender and race is analysed in two women’s magazines, one in English and one in Afrikaans, namely The South African Lady’s Pictorial Journal and Die Boerevrou. To this was added a set of novels by South African authors that were reviewed in each between 1920 and 1929. These are approached as two intertextual reading fields. Thus the analysis of race and gender discourse within popular literature is extended beyond a singular type of text (magazine or book) to a larger yet connected body of reading material, thereby providing a more complete and more nuanced insight into the reading cultures of white women of the period as well as its dominant ideological preoccupations.

By studying social history via a history of reading, this study shows the interrelationship between literary production and its historical moment. It argues that popular literature, in this case in the form of a monthly women’s magazine and novels, reflects and shapes conceptions of what it meant to be a white woman in South Africa in the 1920s and that this was influenced by evolving ideas concerning race and gender. The conjunctive reading of women’s magazines and their extended reading landscape reveals an interconnection between women’s changing agency, as revealed in the magazines, and conceptions of ideal femininity. Although there are clear differences between the femininity presented in the English and Afrikaans reading landscapes, there are also points of commonality. Concepts of white modern womanhood, with its associations with greater access to education and the public world of work and political involvement, interrelated with those on motherhood and traditional conservative gender roles at various points of the decade. This led to concepts of ideal femininity becoming contested across the decade in a manner that reflected different ethnic understandings of the role of women.

Furthermore, the intertextual analysis reveals that the two South African women’s magazines and their companion texts register a clear level of ambivalence towards white modern girls’ increased freedom and the perceived threat that this posed to traditional gender roles and clear racial demarcation within the cities. The expected black peril narratives have, however, been subverted in the companion texts in ways that show white women’s greater concern regarding white girls’ increased promiscuity and vulnerability in relation to white men in the workplace.

Alongside the conditions specific to the local milieu of the texts, internationally circulating discourses around the modern woman, flapper, Spanish influenza, civilisation and progress, as evidenced in the reading landscapes, impacted the conceptions of white womanhood’s racial aspect. In addition to amplifying the connection between health and racial decline, these discourse streams positioned white women as keepers of their race’s health and morality, thereby providing an enabling narrative that could be used for white women’s greater political agency. However, the study argues that this was often dependent on the presentation of discriminatory race discourse, particularly in relation to ideas of contagion and miscegenation.