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Children were central to efforts to eradicate white impoverishment in the Cape Colony in the late nineteenth century. The education and training of poor, white children were believed to be the most effective ways of breaking cycles of poverty, and of ensuring continuing white control over the Cape's resources. Yet a closer reading of the evidence presented to the 1894 Labour Commission and the committee appointed to investigate the Destitute Children Relief Bill suggests that this interest in poor, white children also stemmed from concerns about the children themselves. Destitute white children - both male and female - were described, frequently, as representing a threat to the social, moral, and even economic order, and this view of poor white children shaped official responses to white poverty. This concern for white children reflected not solely their status as 'children' - that they represented the colony's future, were fairly malleable, and could be more easily 'reached' by projects and schemes to eradicate white poverty - but also their problematic class position in a colonial racial order that sought their reform, direction and education into acceptable productive citizens.

This article considers the ways in which children's leisure time was conceptualised and directed in the Cape Colony between 1850 and the end of the century. Using diaries, letters, and evidence presented to Parliamentary commissions of enquiry, the article argues that the notion of 'productivity' was central to ideas around leisure time during this period. Beginning with an overview of the leisure activities of white, middle class, and of poor, coloured, white, and African, children in Cape Town and the Boland during this period, the paper then moves on to a discussion of the child-related work of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Although other churches organised Sunday Schools and other children's societies, the DRC began this work considerably earlier and achieved a much wider reach. This analysis of children's leisure time demonstrates the extent to which children preoccupied colonial commentators and organisations during the second half of the nineteenth century. The history of childhood remains unexplored within South African historiography. This article addresses this lacuna. It sheds light not only on the changing nature of childhood in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony, but also provides new ways of understanding the colony's industrialisation and economic expansion as a result of the mineral revolution.

The Women's Enfranchisement Association of the Union of South Africa (WEAU) was founded in 1911, only a year after the declaration of the Union of South Africa. While scholars of the South African women's suffrage movement have paid particular attention to the race politics of the WEAU and its allied organisations, comparatively little scholarship has focused on white suffragists’ claims to citizenship. This article addresses this scholarly lacuna and argues that the South African women's suffrage movement's demands for citizenship were entangled with a broader project to reform and modernise the South African state. In so doing, the article explores how members of the WEAU imagined what it meant to be ‘South African’ in the 1910s and 1920s, and particularly in relation to their framing of citizenship as a tool for shoring up white supremacy in South Africa.