‘The crying need of South Africa’: the emigration of single British women to the Transvaal, 1901–10

Van‐Helten, Jean Jacques; Williams, Keith

doi:10.1080/03057078308708065

Cited by 47 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…It is commonly noted that many studies in African and imperial history neglect women and gender (Bailey 1983;Bradford 1996:370;Van Helten & Williams 1983;Van Heyningen 1993). In these studies, representation of women and their experiences tend to be overlooked as 'unimportant', resulting in flawed analyses of both men and the colonial encounter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In these studies, representation of women and their experiences tend to be overlooked as 'unimportant', resulting in flawed analyses of both men and the colonial encounter. Where information is provided, it usually focuses on biographical and anecdotal detail (Van Helten & Williams 1983). Given the paucity of information about women who immigrated to southern Africa as early settlers, women's writings in the form of letters and diaries are now being recognised as important, yet underutilised, historical sources (see Erlank 1995Erlank , 1996Hugo 1989;Van Heyningen 1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The diary of Bertha Marks as a heterotopia, as articulated in the artwork, <i>The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters</i>

Farber

Dreyer

2012

Literator

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This article explored the conception, historical context and theoretical underpinnings of Leora Farber’s 2010 artwork entitled The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters, which forms an extension of the work on her exhibition entitled Dis-Location/Re-Location. The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters falls within Dis-Location/Re-Location’s thematics, but focuses on one aspect thereof, namely, how fin-de-siècle Jewish colonial women who were immigrants to southern Africa, as exemplified in the persona of Bertha Marks (1862–1934), experienced nineteenthcentury Victorian gender ideologies. Their life experiences often entailed resistance to their positions as subjects of a patriarchal social system; yet, as women, they were simultaneously complicit in upholding discriminatory colonial ideologies and in maintaining the racial,social and cultural prejudices and forms of subjugation that underpinned them. Bertha Marks is shown to have occupied a personalised heterotopia: whilst operating from within, and maintaining the racial and social prejudices of the colonial era, she was simultaneously constrained by her positioning within it. This heterotopic life experience is reflected in the diary extracts which comprise The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters, which reveal that she occupied the conflicting positions of victim, witness, bystander, collaborator and beneficiary of colonial injustices and exploitation, and assumes varying degrees of co-responsibility and co-liability for her roles and actions

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The diary of Bertha Marks as a heterotopia, as articulated in the artwork, <i>The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters</i>

Farber

Dreyer

2012

Literator

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“…The relationship between gender prescriptions and racial boundaries still remains unevenly unexplored. While we know that European women of different classes experienced the colonial venture very differently from one another and from men, we still know relatively little about the distinct investments they had in a racism they shared (Van Helten and Williams 1983;Knibielher and Goutalier 1985;Callaway 1987). New feminist scholarship has begun to sort out the unique colonial experience of European women as they were incorporated into, resisted and affected the politics of their men.…”

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confidence: 99%

making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th‐century colonial cultures

Stoler¹

1989

American Ethnologist

620

166

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The shift away from viewing colonial elites as homogeneous communities of common interest marks an important trajectory in the anthropology of empire, signaling a major rethinking of gender relations within it. More recent attention to the internal tensions of colonial enterprises has placed new emphasis on the quotidian assertion of European dominance in the colonies, on imperial interventions in domestic life, and thus on the cultural prescriptions by which European women and men lived (Callan and Ardener 1984;Knibiehler and Goutalier 1985;Reijs, et. al 1986; Callaway 1987;Strobel 1987). Having focused on how colonizers have viewed the indigenous Other, we are beginning to sort out how Europeans in the colonies imagined themselves and constructed communities built on asymmetries of race, class and gender-entities significantly at odds with the European models on which they were drawn.These feminist attempts to engage the gender politics of Dutch, French and British imperial cultures converge on some strikingly similar observations; namely that European women in these colonies experienced the cleavages of racial dominance and internal social distinctions very differently than men precisely because of their ambiguous positions, as both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and as active agents of imperial culture in their own right. Concomitantly, the majority of European women who left for the colonies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries confronted profoundly rigid restrictions on their domestic, economic and political options, more limiting than those of metropolitan Europe at the time and sharply contrasting the opportunities open to colonial men.In one form or another these studies raise a basic question: in what ways were gender inequalities essential to the structure of colonial racism and imperial authority? Was the strident misogyny of imperial thinkers and colonial agents a byproduct of received metropolitan values ("they just brought it with them"), a reaction to contemporary feminist demands in Europe ("women need to be put back in their breeding place"), or a novel and pragmatic response to the conditions of conquest? Was the assertion of European supremacy in terms of patriotic manhood and racial virility an expression of imperial domination or a defining feature of it?With sustained challenges to European rule in African and Asian colonies in the early 20th century, sexual prescriptions by class, race and gender became increasingly central to the politics of rule and subject to new forms of scrutiny by colonial states. Focusing on the Netherlands lndies and French Indochina, but drawing on other contexts, this article examines how the very categories of "colonizer" and "colonized" were increasingly secured through forms of sexual control which defined the common political interests of European colonials and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves. The metropolitan and colonial discourses on health, "racial degeneracy," and social reform from this period reveal how sexual sa...

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Bone functional adaptation does not erase neutral evolutionary information

Agostini

Holt

Relethford

2018

American J Phys Anthropol

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Among-population patterns of diaphyseal variation are consistent with neutral expectations and are consistent with historical data on population composition, genetics, and migration. Furthermore, plasticity induced by Industrial-era levels of physical activity does not erase these neutral signatures. Diaphyseal variation may therefore be useful to infer neutral (presumably genetic) information across populations, and controlling for existing relationships may strengthen inferences of physical activity made when comparing limb bone structure across populations.

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‘The crying need of South Africa’: the emigration of single British women to the Transvaal, 1901–10

Cited by 47 publications

References 5 publications

The diary of Bertha Marks as a heterotopia, as articulated in the artwork, <i>The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters</i>

The diary of Bertha Marks as a heterotopia, as articulated in the artwork, <i>The Futility of Writing 24-Page Letters</i>

making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th‐century colonial cultures

Bone functional adaptation does not erase neutral evolutionary information

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