British Women Wanted

2016 ◽  
pp. 283-309
Author(s):  
Melissa Free
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Olive Schreiner ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The New Woman

This essay brings together three areas that until fairly recently had received scant attention from scholars of the British Empire: female emigration, ‘white settler colonies’, and emigration literature. In particular, it examines the generic innovations of Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, and Gertrude Page, the former a self-identified ‘English South African’ and the latter two authorial informants, British authors who spent time in southern Africa and wrote about the region as insiders. These writers, I argue, bolstered female, even feminist, subjectivity through generic innovation that is an effect of the translocal. Employing new fictional forms—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, and the empire romance—to solve markedly gendered problems, they not only imagine new spaces for settler women beyond the matrimonial and the maternal; they also anticipate generic developments generally associated with the metropole.

A Woman's Novel: Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, and Hélène Cixous's Écriture Féminine

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Marina Cano
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
British Society ◽  
Olive Schreiner ◽  
Ecriture Feminine ◽  
Feminine Writing ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The New Woman

In the 1880s and 1890s, New Woman writers changed the face of British society and British fiction through their sexually open works, which critiqued old notions of marriage, and through their stylistic experimentation, which announced the modernist novel. New Woman scholarship has often studied their work in connection with that of French feminists of the late twentieth century, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. This article reconsiders the nature of this connection through a close examination of novels by two of the most popular New Woman authors, Mona Caird (1854–1932) and Olive Schreiner (1855–1920). I read Caird's The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) through the lens of Hélène Cixous's theories of écriture féminine, or feminine writing, to question the accusation of biological determinism which is frequently directed at both groups of writers. By applying Cixous's notions of feminine aesthetics, bisexuality, and alterity to Caird and Schreiner, my study provides the basis for a new understanding of their novels. More generally, it complements and qualifies the connection between the New Woman and so-called French feminism, thereby helping produce a more complex framework to study the fin de siècle.

“Because we are white men”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
White Men ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
South African War ◽  
White Settler ◽  
British Military

This chapter examines Irish nationalism in the context of the British Empire and its rapid expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Erskine Childers who participated in the South African War as a volunteer member of an artillery company that augmented the regular British military forces. The son of an English father and an Irish mother, he entered the war as a British patriot but in its aftermath became a pro-Boer and, soon thereafter, an Irish nationalist. He had much in common with the white South African Jan Christian Smuts, who was also a participant in the war as a political and military leader of the Boer republics. Both men were deeply concerned with the place of the white settler colonies, or dominions, in the emerging British Empire–Commonwealth, but ultimately they went in markedly different directions.

The Boer War (1899–1902)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Micajah Phillips
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Gold Deposits ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Boer War ◽  
South African War ◽  
Peace Settlement ◽  
The Great War

The British Empire waged two wars in southern Africa at the close of the nineteenth century. In the First Boer War (or Transvaal War) of 1880–81, Boer soldiers repelled Britain’s attempt to annex the diamond-rich Transvaal. The tense peace that followed was broken by the outbreak of the Second Boer War (or South African War, or Anglo-Boer War) of 1899–1902, the largest and most significant war the British Empire waged between the 1857 Indian Rebellion and the Great War of 1914–18. Fighting began when Britain sought to declare sovereignty over the Transvaal and Orange Free State, where huge gold deposits had recently been discovered. This provoked anti-British sentiment in southern Africa and among Britain’s colonial rivals, inspiring volunteer soldiers from the Netherlands and Germany to fight alongside the ethnically Dutch and German Boers. In the end, Britain lost millions of pounds and thousands of lives before reaching a peace settlement that would recognize British control over the Boer republics while offering a path to self-government (laying the foundations for both the Union of South Africa in 1910 and that dominion’s white separatist rule). In England, the war also exacerbated concerns over national degeneration when more than one-half of recruits failed military fitness exams (owing to the deprived living conditions of the urban poor), raising fresh questions about Britain’s imperial ambitions at the turn of the century. Though initially a popular war among Britons, the war’s grim aftermath had a deeper impact on modernism. ‘Since that period,’ Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer) reflected, ‘the whole tone of England appears to me to have entirely changed’ (171).

Region of Birth and Child Mortality among Black Migrants to South Africa: Is there a foreign-born advantage?

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany L Green ◽  
Amos C Peters
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Child Mortality ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Black Immigrants ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Region Of Origin ◽  
Child Deaths

Much of the existing evidence for the healthy immigrant advantage comes from developed countries. We investigate whether an immigrant health advantage exists in South Africa, an important emerging economy.  Using the 2001 South African Census, this study examines differences in child mortality between native-born South African and immigrant blacks.  We find that accounting for region of origin is critical: immigrants from southern Africa are more likely to experience higher lifetime child mortality compared to the native-born population.  Further, immigrants from outside of southern Africa are less likely than both groups to experience child deaths.  Finally, in contrast to patterns observed in developed countries, we detect a strong relationship between schooling and child mortality among black immigrants.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Social Work and Indigenisation: A South African Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lobelo David Mogorosi ◽  
Dumisani Gaylord Thabede
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Work ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Work Education ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
World View ◽  
Joint Decision ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Global North ◽  
Work Education

For relevance to societal reality and challenges, countries should structure their social work education to deal with specific conditions and cultures. From its global North (i.e. Western Europe and North America) origins, social work has contributed to the expansion of the discipline and profession to the developing world, including South Africa. During the three decades (from the mid-1980s until the present day) during which they have taught social work in South Africa, the authors have witnessed half-hearted efforts to really integrate indigenous knowledge into the curricula. In writings and professional gatherings, scant attention was paid to curricula transformation imperatives enriching practice. To its credit, the Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions (ASASWEI) advocates for decolonisation and indigenisation of social work education. Discussing decolonisation and indigenisation in social work curricula, the paper critiques assumptions of global North ideas, cloaked as if universally applicable. An example is about some principles of social casework – a method of choice in South Africa – which mostly disregards cultural nuances of clientele with a communal collective world view that relies on joint decision-making. A culturally sensitive approach is adopted as theoretical framework for this paper. The paper concludes with recommendations that should help ensure that social work curricula strive towards being indigenous, contextualised and culturally appropriate.

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