Iris Berger

Marxists or Fashionable Ladies? Gender, Identity and Working-Class History

A condescending description of African garment workers in South Africa during the 1950s unintentionally highlights the complex issues of identity that have come to fascinate many historians. In the words of Mia Brandel: These garment workers furnish an interesting illustration of the confusion caused through European influences, and through different European ideas about class. Many of these women come in touch with Marxist ideas, and are habitually in an atmosphere where Marxist terminology and ‘class’ notions fill the air. They have somehow adopted the Marxian class-consciousness, and talk proudly about themselves as ‘we workers’. It needs all the natural placidity of the African woman to cope successfully with two such contradictory attitudes as the Marxist workers’ class-consciousness and the capitalistic class-consciousness of being amongst the highest paid African women and, as to social contacts and friendships, belonging to the upper class layer of the ‘fashionable’ set.2

Perspectives, Interpretations, and Challenges

A few weeks ago while I was thinking about these papers, I was also reading John Le Carre’s most recent novel, The Constant Gardener, about corrupt pharmaceutical companies in East Africa. Although the plot focuses on Kenya, near the book’s end the main character ventures into the Sudan in search of his wife’s murderers. There the chief suspect, now in humanitarian guise, expresses his opinion about the Sudan, and indeed about the continent of Africa. “The women make the homes,” he said. “The men make the wars. The whole of Africa—that’s one big gender fight, man. Only the women do God’s work around here.”1 While this is obviously a fictional account, it continued to resonate in my mind as I read these papers. Particularly for those on the contemporary period, the shadow of war is critical. Let me begin by drawing out some similarities and differences among the papers, after which I will address each one individually. Although all the papers concern the Sudan and have overlapping interests and methodologies, they are very different. They are writing about a vast country. Jay Spaulding is primarily interested in the north, Stephanie Beswick and Julia and Wal Duany in the rural south, and Sondra Hale in their interactions. Beswick, Spaulding, and the Duanys are concerned with marriage, although (her title notwithstanding) Beswick treats marriage as one part of a wide-ranging discussion. Three of the papers, in very different ways, address heterogeneous layers of tradition in terms

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry 1900-1980

Part I - gender industrialization: gender, community and working-class history dependency and domesticity - womens wage labour, 1900-1925. Part II - women in the new industrial unions: patterns of womens labour, 1925-1940 daughters of the depression commandos of working women a lengthening thread. Part II - a new working class and the challenge of diversity: nimble fingers and keen eyesight - women in wartime production a new working class, 1940-1960 a solidarity fragmented - garment workers in the Transvaal food and canning workers in the Cape - the structure of gender and race standing united never far from home - family, community and working women. Part IV - decentralization and the rise of independent unions: city and periphery, 1960-1980 repression and resistance.