Bread and honour: White working class women and Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s

Women have occupied a central place in the ideological formulations of nati onalist movements. In particular, the figure of woman as mother recurs thro ughout the history of nationalist political mobilizations. In Afrikaner nat ionalism, this symbolic female identity takes the form of the volksmoeder ( mother of the nation) icon, commonly assumed to describe a highly circumscr ibed set of women's social roles, created for women by men. The academic or thodoxy holds that middle-class Afrikaner women submitted to the volksmoede r ideology early on in the development of Afrikaner nationalism but that th e working class Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers' Union (GWU) represe nted an enclave of resistance to dominant definitions of ethnic identity. T hey chose instead to ally themselves with militant, class-conscious trade u nionism. This paper argues that Afrikaner women of different classes helped to shape the contours of the volksmoeder icon. Whilst middle class Afrikan er women questioned the idea that their social contribution should remain r estricted to narrow familial and charitable concerns, prominent working cla ss women laid claim to their own entitlement to the volksmoeder heritage. I n doing so, the latter contributed to the popularization and reinterpretati on of an ideology that was at this time seeking a wider audience. The paper argues that the incorporation of Afrikaner women into the socialist milieu of the GWU did not result in these women simply discarding the ethnic comp onents of their identity. Rather their self-awareness as Afrikaner women wi th a recent rural past was grafted onto their new experience as urban facto ry workers. The way in which leading working class Afrikaner women articula ted this potent combination of 'derived' and 'inherent' ideology cannot be excluded from the complex process whereby Afrikaner nationalism achieved su ccess as a movement appealing to its imagined community across boundaries o f class and gender.