Search results

Colonizing African families . - Confrontation and adaptation . - Domesticity and modernization . - Mothers of nationalism . - The struggle continues . - "Messengers of a new design": marriage, family and sexuality . - Women's rights: the second decolonization? . - Empowerment and inequality in a new global age . - Contradictions and challenges

"Discusses the history of South Africa from the early centuries of the Common Era to the present-day and addresses broad themes of world history such as colonialism, white settlement, nationalism and reconciliation"--Provided by publisher

Abstract: During the late 1950s, prompted by the US State Department, an interracial group of national leaders of women's organizations in the United States formed the African Women's Committee to reach out to their African counterparts in the wake of successful independence movements throughout the continent. After consulting with numerous African women and leading experts on Africa, the committee initiated a program that brought groups of African women to the United States for short training programs designed to strengthen their leadership skills through both coursework and immersion in women's organizations. This article examines the assumptions both groups of women brought to their interactions and the ways the program changed during this period as a response to racist encounters in the US, new teachers in the classes and African women's evaluations of their experiences.

Based on a case study of the South African food and canning industry at the Cape from 1940 to 1960, this article examines the conditions that fostered women's high level of involvement both in the trade union and in local and national political organizations concerned with gender and racial issues. Particularly important were women's prevalence in seasonal labor, which gave them few individual options for improving their situation at work; a progressive, nonracial trade union that encouraged close ties between family, work, and community and that kept women involved during the off-season; and an active political movement concerned to mobilize women against the threats to their work and family lives from the apartheid state. In addition, unlike women in many areas of Asia and Latin America, these women had a long tradition of productive labor and were not expected to refrain from visible public activity.