Deborah Gaitskell

The Imperial Tie: Obstacle or Asset for South Africa's Women Suffragists before 1930?

The South African suffrage organisation, the Women’s Enfranchisement Association of the Union (WEAU), produced a newspaper, Flashlight, in the late 1920s. Its second-last edition, just before victory brought the vote in 1930, carried a striking back-page advertisement which serves to highlight a long-standing, weighty contradiction of the franchise campaign by South Africa’s white women. The advert positioned such women firmly within the transnational ‘British world’, but unusually for such a quintessentially English publication voiced its frustrated complaint and rallying cry in Afrikaans:

Transnational Biblewomen: Asian and African women in Christian mission

The last century has seen a ‘dramatic shift’ in the distribution of Christians between the different regions of the world. Whereas by 2000, according to one estimate, 32 per cent of the world’s Christians lived in Asia and Africa, as compared with only 5 per cent in 1900, the proportion living in Europe, the Russian empire and North America dropped from about 80 per cent of the total to around 40 per cent over the same period. 1 This seismic shift is only gradually compelling the necessary complementary transformation in how the Christian past is researched and understood. The productive 1990s scholarly collaboration now publishing a series of Studies in the History of Christian Missions (with Eerdmans) had a telling change of name: from the ‘North Atlantic Missiology Project’ to ‘Currents in World Christianity’. Yet, despite ‘estimates that at least twothirds of the new Christians in the global church are women’ and despite women’s mission organisations in the early twentieth century supporting ‘three times as many indigenous women as evangelists as they did foreign missionaries’, 2 a regrettable

Gender, Power and Voice in South African Anglicanism: The Society of Women Missionaries’ Journal, 1913–1955

ABSTRACT Compared with the Nonconformists, the anglican Church in South africa employed a surprisingly large number of single women missionaries in evangelistic, educational and medical work among blacks in the first half of the twentieth century. Looking at three watershed moments, this article offers a preliminary assessment of the organisation which they set up for mutual learning and support. It analyses the report of the founding conference of the Society of Women Missionaries in 1913 alongside copies of the SWM Journal from their 1937 zenith and 1955 closure. the womens assessment of their place in the gendered ecclesiastical hierarchy is explored first. Changing power relations among black and white churchwomen are then suggested by the growth of African female agency, while differences in interactions with white society are also glimpsed over time. Finally, the devastating impact of apartheid policy on mission work in the 1950s demonstrates how the adverse political context was further acting to silence the voice of women missionaries, necessitating fresh ways for Christian women to advance their faith in South africa.