¹ Papers of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Harvard University (ABC): 15. 4, v. 39, no. 131, ‘The Place of Women in the Church on the Mission Field’. One of the very first ‘contradictions of domesticity’ that should be noted is that urban missionary wives themselves did not lead a purely domestic life, in two ways. Though not in paid employment, they were frequently out at meetings, like their husbands; they also employed domestic servants to help ‘keep the home’, a further ideological twist.

² Alexander, S., ‘Women'swork in nineteenth-century London; a study of the years 1820–50’, in Mitchell, J. and Oakley, A. (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth, 1976), 61.Google Scholar See also Hall, C., ‘The early formation of Victorian domestic ideology’, in Burman, S. (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Cott, N. F., The Bonds of Womanhood. ‘Woman's Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977), 46–7, 62–70, 84Google Scholar; Davin, A., ‘The working-class family: co-operating to survive in early industrialisation’, paper for African History Seminar, Institute of Commonwealth Studies (I.C.S.), London, November 1980, 3–6Google Scholar; Malos, E., ‘Introduction’ (17–18)Google Scholar, and Hall, C., ‘The history of the housewife’, in Malos, E. (ed.), The Politics of Housework (London, 1980).Google Scholar

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⁹ Quoted in Alexander, , ‘Women's work’, 62.Google Scholar

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³⁰ Umteteli wa Bantu, 6 Nov. 1937, 3 June 1939.Google Scholar Much the same approach was adopted with unmarried mothers and former prostitutes in late Victorial Britain.

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⁵³ Report of the Native Affairs Commission 1936, 6; ibid. 1939–1940, 37–38.

⁵⁴ ‘A critical perspective on the domestic labour debate’, Women in South African History, I (January 1981), 19–20.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ See Kaluzynska, E., ‘Wiping the floor with theory – a survey of writings on housework’, Feminist Review, VI (1980), 45, 47,Google Scholar and Barrett, M., Women's Oppression Today. Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London, 1980), 221.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Barrett, , Women's Oppression, 214.Google Scholar It should be noted, however, that some black women are increasingly disillusioned with men and marriage, while many African families have become (often involuntarily) matrifocal.

⁵⁷ Wells, J., ‘Women's resistance to passes in Bloemfontein during the inter-war period’, Africa Perspective, XV (1980), 16, 31, 22, 24.Google Scholar She sees the women's victory as being partly due to the fact that the British-dominated parliament shared an ideology of domesticity.

⁵⁸ Yawitch, J., Black Women in South Africa: Capitalism, Employment and Reproduction (Africa Perspective Dissertation, no. 2, Johannesburg, 1980), 75.Google Scholar

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