This threefold thrust of women into the public sphere steadily weakened male resistance to the full enfranchisement of women. It was among the Afrikaner National Party that the critical change of attitude took place. In their case, the mass movement of Afrikaner women into the cities and industrial employment prompted a re-evaluation of their previously implacably hostile opposition to the women’s vote.4 Since Ekurhuleni was in the forefront of this process (as is discussed below), it is to Ekurhuleni working Afrikaner women that much of the credit for this shift of attitude is due. In addition the National Party, under the leadership of J.B. Hertzog, began to recognise the value of white women’s votes in diluting the Cape African franchise, and allowing them to ram through their programme of wholesale segregation. Accordingly Hertzog finally introduced a bill enfranchising the white women of the Union in 1929.5
INSURGENT AFRIKANER WOMEN
The large-scale entry of Afrikaner women into Ekurhuleni was driven by a combination of rural distress and urban opportunity. In the Ekurhuleni drought of 1916, for example, which seared much of the country, tens of thousands of ‘bywoners’ and their families were uprooted from the land, over 4 000 of whom sought employment on the Rand. Again in the great droughts of the early 1930s an even larger flood of poor whites poured into the same area, a large number of whom were young Afrikaner women.6 Industrial expansion and the growth of employment opportunities more generally on the Rand offered some hope of relief. Davies records the numbers of white workers employed nationally, but mostly on the Rand, in secondary industry as rising from 66 000 in 1911 to 88 844 in 1915 and 124 702 in 1919–1921.7 The latter was the fruit of war-time isolation. From 1925 the expansion of industry continued at an even faster rate, in response to protective tariffs which were imposed by the Pact Government to aid selected secondary industries. Again the bulk of this growth was centred on the Rand. White women were the principal beneficiaries of this surge of import substituting light industrial growth especially in the food, drink, tobacco, clothing and textiles, books and printing, and leather ware sectors. The ‘civilised labour’ policies adopted by the Pact Government in 1924 required that tariff protection under the Tariff Act of 1925 should only be extended to industries employing whites. What it did not specify, however, was what gender they should be, and since the Wage Board (set up again in 1925) from the start accepted a male/female differential ‘without question’ in the wages it set, deeming that white women needed only to support themselves (and not a family like white men) and so could be paid at a rate which was governed by considerations similar to black (migrant) men. Many factories ‘hitherto employing non-Europeans were now endeavouring to staff their factories with Europeans (women) only’ reported the Chief Inspector of Factories in 1926. The number of women employed in industrial jobs accordingly trebled between 1927 and 1936, while those employed as shop assistants doubled.8 By 1924, 48% of the industrial workforce was made up of women, rising to a remarkable 73% in 1935.9 During the depression years the bias towards white women was particularly pronounced as they were in the only category of industrial employees whose number increased. Only subsequently, in the industrial boom of the late 1930s, did men of all races fare better.10 This to a large extent accounts for the preponderance of white (mainly Afrikaner) women on the Rand.
Much of this increase in women’s factory employment occurred in Ekurhuleni, above all in Germiston. In 1917 Germiston Council had the foresight to lay out two industrial townships, taking credit for being the first local authority in South Africa to take such a step. It quickly proved to be a prescient move. In 1921 five out of 12 gold mines in the Germiston area closed and ceased production, to be followed by two more in 1922. Now the secondary industries which had been attracted by the town stepped in to take up the slack. By 1918 the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Station had been erected in one of Germiston’s industrial townships as had a number of engineering works. In 1921 the Rand Gold Refinery was also erected close by which was soon processing a huge three-quarters of the gold mined in the world. By the early 1920s numerous small tailoring concerns had also opened business in Germiston’s industrial parks to be followed by some of the largest clothing factories on the Reef, such as the New York and the Germiston and East Rand clothing factories. Food, printing, chemical and leather ware factories joined the throng both here and later in other Ekurhuleni towns.11
By 1934 it was being reported by the Department of Labour that:
The future prosperity of Germiston depends on its industries, the principal of which is ready made clothing. Now eight factories all work to capacity employing 1 000 Europeans (mainly women) and 150 natives.12
Afrikaner women were in the vanguard of this move. Afrikaner families came to town to take advantage of their children’s (and especially their daughters’) wage-earning opportunities. Many single rural Afrikaner women took this course because poverty at home drove them there to support themselves (15% in one survey) or to support dependants in their former homes. Another survey conducted in 1932 found one-fifth of Afrikaner women acting as sole-breadwinners in families averaging four to five members while over one-third belonged to family groups with no male wage-earner recorded. The poorest, most recent arrivals found themselves trapped in the least desirable jobs such as domestic service and sweat shops. Only a fifth of their number managed to secure factory work. Most of these Afrikaner women factory workers had been born or lived ten years in the town. The majority were young and single and only worked until they were married and could be supported (or do out-work at home).13 Prior to this they were often compelled to live in the most miserable circumstances, as the wages they received were insufficient to cover lodging, food and transportation. Such women survived by finding cheap lodgings where they might sleep three or four to a bed, or share premises with men, and lived only on dry bread and coffee. This left them vulnerable in a whole host of ways. Illness from malnutrition was not uncommon.14 To obtain supplementary income it appears that many resorted to what Freed termed ‘amateur prostitution’ – a full half of them, according to Freed, in 1938.15 From the late 1910s and especially the 1920s a moral panic began to take hold on the Rand about white Afrikaner women’s prostitution, promiscuity, racial mixing in the Rand’s multiracial slums, and factory work. Arduous factory work (along with bread-line wages) were claimed to weaken Afrikaner women’s physical and moral powers leading to sexual immorality. The prime sign or symbol of such degeneration was venereal diseases whose rates soared among poorer whites in this period.16
Exploited, denied self-respect, pejoratively labelled ‘factory meide’, and suspected of lacking moral disciplines of all kinds, these young Afrikaner women who flocked to Ekurhuleni faced an uphill struggle in the town, and were always threatened with sliding down into a material and moral abyss.17 A major source of support allowing them to haul themselves out of this hole was the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU). Known as the Witwatersrand Tailors’ Association for most of the 1920s, this underwent a change of name (to the GWU) and of organisational style once Solly Sachs was elected General Secretary in 1928. It then transformed itself into one of the most powerful and militant industrial unions on the Rand, enrolling 80–100% of white female workers in the industry for most of this time and waging a series of strikes which would ultimately lead to significant improvements in wages and