A world of their own : A history of African Women's education and the politics of social reproduction in South Africa by Meghan Healy-Clancy

9781869142421

University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012

Paperback, 300 pages

Description

This book is an elegantly written social history of the Inanda seminary, embedded in the wider social and political context throughout, and skilfully brings together a vast array of information relating to 140 years of African women's schooling. Through the prism of the Inanda seminary, this study examines how rising numbers of African women came to attend school and the meanings of their schooling in the making and unmaking of the racialised state. The mission schools that provided nearly all African schooling before apartheid prepared girls to run homes, schools and clinics on a shoestring, in an arrangement that appealed to officials. Yet as nationalist movements developed in the first half of the twentieth century, women from Inanda and peer institutions found in their work as teachers and health workers power to shape the future of 'the race'. When apartheid officials came to power in 1948, they needed the skills of an African middle-class to govern. But they needed to undermine this class politically to rule.
These tensions came to a head in the Bantu Education Act of 1953 which sought to resolve them through a gendered strategy: officials encouraged African women's training as teachers and nurses, even as they attempted to limit African male-led political agitation by nationalising most mission schools and limiting their curricula to preparation for semi-skilled labour. From the interstices of racialised patriarchy, the most talented African female students at Inanda and other high schools used their schooling to push at personal, professional and political boundaries - belying the gendered assumptions of 'separate development'.