The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa

Abstract

This essay rethinks the gender history and historiography of interwar sub-Saharan Africa by deploying the heuristic device of the ‘modern girl’ to consider how global circuits of representation and commerce informed this period of gender tumult. This device has been developed by a research group at the University of Washington to understand the global emergence during the 1920s and 1930s of female figures identified by their cosmopolitan look, their explicit eroticism and their use of specific commodities. Previous scholarship has suggested that a black modern girl imbricated in international circuits of images, ideologies and commodities only became visible in southern Africa in the post-Second World War period. Yet, analysis of the black newspaper Bantu World reveals the emergence of such a figure by the early 1930s. The modern girl heuristic helps to situate race as a key category of analysis in scholarship on women and gender in interwar Africa as contemporaries consistently debated her in racial terms. In South Africa, some social observers saw African young women’s school education, professional careers and cosmopolitan look as contributing to ‘racial uplift’. Others accused the African modern girl of ‘prostituting’ her sex and race by imitating white, coloured or Indian women, and by delaying or avoiding marriage, dressing provocatively and engaging in premarital and inter-racial sex. Cosmetics use was one of the most contentious issues surrounding the black modern girl because it drew attention to the phenotypic dimensions of racial distinctions. By analysing a beauty contest in Bantu World together with articles and letters on, and advertisements for, cosmetics, this essay demonstrates how, in white-dominated segregationist South Africa, the modern girl emerged through and posed challenges to categories of race and respectability.

‘The Girl About Town’: discussions of modernity and female youth inDrummagazine, 1951–1970

“…The links between Drum's discourses of modernity embedded in their own particular context as opposition to Apartheid and global discourse of consumerism and a new universal youth culture were numerous and complex. The female youth that Drum recreated in its pages was recognisably the type of 'modern girl' that Lynn Thomas and others have traced the emergence of (Thomas, 2006). The focus in the late 1950s and the 1960s on young women's economic empowerment and sexual availability can be read as a site for the local negotiation of ideas of a modern commercialised youth of fashion, shopping, and dating.…”

The Politics of New African Marriage in Segregationist South Africa

“…Nonetheless, the forms of marriage that New Africans pursued, and their social meanings, represented a significant historical shift. Nineteenth-century missionaries had urged converts to see marriage as a union of two individuals-uniting on their own volition, and creating a sanctuary from the world in which to raise Christian children (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992 ;Schapera 1941 ;Thomas 2009 ). 2 Yet missionaries, in their expressed ideals and in their own models of monogamy, could not present marriage as an exclusively private institution.…”

“…In part, this was an ironic consequence of the commercial ownership structure: to attract readers and thus advertisements, these newspapers became more mass-oriented publications, including more images and reportage on social life from the 1930s (Ukpanah 2005 ). The Bantu World 's women's pages reflected this push; letters from readers suggest that it provoked popular interest, attracting advertisers hawking a new range of goods to women (Thomas 2008 ). While newspapers were not a mass phenomenon in this period, they did tap into a population that was aware of the power of texts.…”

“…While newspapers were not a mass phenomenon in this period, they did tap into a population that was aware of the power of texts. The African literacy rate increased from 12 to 20 percent between the mid1930s and mid-1940s: by the mid-1940s some twenty-four thousand copies of the Bantu World sold each week; staff claimed that at least five people read each issue and, significantly, that they shared its contents with nonliterate neighbors and kin (Ukpanah 2005 ;Thomas 2008 ).…”

“…Whether these narrative strategies reflected Piliso's own views alone or also revealed those of the "Editress," their effect was to underscore the contestations in which New African marriage was enmeshed-debates that would deepen over the next decade, as women's urban settlement and public presence increased (Thomas 2008(Thomas , 2009Hellman 1948 ;du Toit 2005).…”