Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available vie the Internet

Thesis (MA (History))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This thesis investigates the production of different forms of Afrikaner ‘femininity’ at the Huguenot Seminary and College in Wellington, between 1873 and 1910. Founded by Andrew Murray, the moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), specifically to train Dutch-Afrikaner girls as teachers and missionaries, the school was based on a model of women’s education developed at the Mount Holyoke Seminary in Connecticut and the majority of the teachers who worked at Huguenot until the 1920s were thus American-born and trained. The Huguenot Seminary proved to be an enormous success: it was constantly in need of extra room to house its overflow of pupils, the girls came near the top of the Colony’s teaching examinations from 1875 onwards, and its associated College – founded in 1898 – was one of the first institutions in South Africa where young women could study for university degrees. It had a profound impact on the lives of a considerable proportion of white, bourgeois Dutch-Afrikaner – and English-speaking – women during this period of rapid and wide-ranging transformation in South African society and politics. This thesis evaluates the extent to and manner in which Huguenot created particular Afrikaner ‘femininities’. The discussion begins with an exploration of the relationship between the Seminary, the Mount Holyoke system of girls’ education, and the DRC’s evangelicalism during the religious ‘revivals’ sweeping the Cape Colony in 1874-1875 and 1884-1885, paying particular attention to the teachers’ attempts to foster a quasi-religious community at the Seminary, and to the pupils’ responses to the school’s intense religiosity. It moves on to a discussion of the discourses surrounding the ideal of the educated woman that arose in the Seminary and College’s annuals between 1895 and 1910, identifying three key forms of ‘femininity’ promoted in magazines’ articles, short stories, and poetry. Finally, the thesis examines the impact of the growth of an Afrikaner ethnicity (specifically in the form of the First Afrikaans Language Movement), the South African War (1899-1902), and Alfred Milner’s South Africanism, on the ‘femininity’ espoused by the Seminary and College between 1874 and 1910.

Women's magazines are popular cultural forms which offer readers representations intended to advise women on how to work towards and achieve idealised femininities. They perform such a function within the wider socio-historical context of gender relations. In a country such as South Africa, where patriarchal gender relations have historically been structured to favour men over women and masculinity over femininity, the representation of femininity in contemporary women's magazines may serve to reinforce or challenge these existent unequal gender relations. Informed by a feminist poststructuralist understanding of the gendered positioning of subjects through discourse, this study is a textual analysis that investigates the subject positions or possible identities offered to readers of Destiny, a South African business and lifestyle women's magazine. Black women, who make up the majority of Destiny's readership, have historically been excluded from the formal economy. In light of such a background, Destiny offers black women readers, through its representations of well-known business women, possible identities to take up within the white male dominated field of business practice. The magazine also offers 'lifestyle content', which suggests to readers possible ways of being in other areas of social life. Through a method of critical discourse analysis, this study critically analyses the subject positions offered to readers of Destiny, in order to determine to what extent the magazine's representations of business women endorse or confront unequal gender relations. The findings of this study are that Destiny offers women complex subject positions which simultaneously challenge and reassert patriarchy. While offering readers positions from which to challenge race based gender discrimination – a legacy of the apartheid past – the texts analysed tend to neglect non-racially motivated gender prejudice. It is concluded that although not comprehensively challenging unequal gender relations, the magazine whittles away some tenets of patriarchy.