² Bozzoli, Belinda and Delius, Peter, ‘Radical history and South African society’, Radical History Review, xlvi–xlvii (1990), 33.Google Scholar

³ Walker, Cherryl (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴ Participants at a conference on Women and Gender in Southern Africa at the University of Natal in January 1991 raised, as a political problem, the preponderance of white women amongst South African feminist academics (author's observation).

⁵ Walker, Cherryl, ‘Women and gender in Southern Africa to 1945: an overview’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 5–7.Google Scholar

⁶ See Mohanty, Chandra, ‘Under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Feminist Review, xxx (1988), 61–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a critique of ethnocentric methodology; and Joan Scott, Part I and Part III of Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, Nicholson, Linda, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, and Riley, Denise, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Hampshire, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as examples of some of the radical rethinking of historiography that centers gender analytically.

⁷ Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History, 3.Google Scholar

⁸ Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, ‘Placing women's history in history’, New Left Review, cxxxiii (1982), 5–29.Google Scholar

⁹ See, for example, Nancy Fraser, ‘What's critical about critical theory ? The case of Habermas and gender’, in Fraser, (ed.), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, 1989), 113–43Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, ‘Feminist critiques of the public/private divide’ and ‘The patriarchal welfare state’, in Pateman, (ed.), The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford, 1989), 118–40 and 179–209Google Scholar; and Scott, Joan, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, in Gender and the Politics of History, 28–50.Google Scholar

¹⁰ For the most recent theorizing of race, class and state, see Wolpe, Harold, Race, Class and the Apartheid State (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Greenberg, Stanley B., Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets and Resistance in South Africa (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar; and Posel, Deborah, ‘Rethinking the race-class debate in South African historiography’, Social Dynamics, ix (1983), 50–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ See Belinda Bozzoli's introduction, ‘Class, community and ideology in the evolution of South African society’, to Bozzoli, (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg, 1987)Google Scholar, and Bozzoli and Delius, ‘Radical history’, for discussion of the different approaches to South Africanist history, where debates between the ‘structuralists’ and the ‘social historians’ around the place and form of theory in historiography became sometimes quite antagonistic.

¹² This point is variously argued by Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitimate; Chanock, Martin, ‘Writing South African legal history: a prospectus’, J. Afr. Hist., xxx (1989), 265–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baruch Hirson's review of Moss, Glenn and Obery, Ingrid (eds.), South African Contemporary Analysis, in South African Review of Books, xvi (1990), 5Google Scholar; and Wolpe, Race, Class and the Apartheid State.

¹³ Walker's, Cherryl study, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London, 1982)Google Scholar, remains the most comprehensive and definitive history of women's struggles and organizations.

¹⁴ For example Bernstein, Hilda, For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears: Women in Apartheid South Africa (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Walker, Women and Resistance; Yawitch, Joanne, ‘Natal, 1959: the women's protests’ (paper presented to the Conference on the History of Opposition in Southern Africa, Johannesburg, 1978)Google Scholar; Bradford, Helen, ‘“We are now the men”: women's beer protests in the Natal countryside, 1929’, in Bozzoli, (ed.), Class, Community, 292–323Google Scholar; and a number of papers on women's anti-pass struggles by Wells, Julia, ‘“The day the town stood still”: women in resistance in Potchefstroom 1912–1930’, in Bozzoli, Belinda (ed.), Township, Labour and Protest: Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, 1979), 269–307Google Scholar; ‘“Passes and bypasses”: freedom of movement for African women under the Urban Areas Act of South Africa’, in Hay, Margaret Jean and Wright, Marcia (eds.), African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston, 1982), 126–50Google Scholar; and ‘Why women rebel: a comparative study of South African women's resistance in Bloemfontein (1913) and Johannesburg (1958)’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, x (1983), 55–70.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Wolpe, Harold, ‘Capitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa: from segregation to apartheid’, Economy and Society, I (1972), 425–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ Manicom, Linzi, Mbilinyi, Marjorie and Hartmann, Jeanette, Women under Apartheid in South Africa (unpublished ms, Paris, 1979)Google Scholar; and Yawitch, Joanne, ‘Black women in South Africa: capitalism, employment and reproduction’ (B.A. Honours dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1978).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Bozzoli, Belinda, ‘Marxism, feminism and South African studies’,. J. Southern Afr. Studies, ix (1983), 139–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Molyneux, Maxine, ‘Beyond the domestic labour debate’, New Left Review, cxvi (1979), 3–28.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See for example, Linda Nicholson, ‘Feminism and Marx: integrating kinship with the economic’, in Benhabib, Seyla and Cornell, Drucilla (eds.), Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis, 1987), 16–30.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Bozzoli, ‘Marxism, feminism’.

²⁰ See the discussion by Iris Young, ‘Beyond the unhappy marriage: a critique of dual systems theory’, in Sargent, Lydia (ed.), Women and Revolution (Montreal, 1981), 43–70.Google Scholar

²¹ Bozzoli, , ‘Marxism, feminism’, 147–8.Google Scholar

²² The debate about the relationship between patriarchy, the domestic sphere and the public sphere has produced a number of different positions. My argument here is influenced particularly by the writings of Linda Nicholson, who makes a strong case for understanding the constitution of those separate spheres historically in her Gender and History (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Carol Pateman, who explores the complexity of representations of public and private within liberal, marxist and feminist theory in, for example, her essay ‘Feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy’, in The Disorder of Women; and Rose, Nikolas, ‘Beyond the public/private division: law, power and the family’, Journal of Law and Society, xiv (1987), 61–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ See particularly Rose, ‘Beyond the public/private’.

²⁴ Bozzoli, and Delius, , ‘Radical history’, 33.Google Scholar

²⁵ See, for example, Beinart, William, ‘Production and the material basis of chieftainship: Pondoland, c. 1830–80’, in Marks, Shula and Atmore, Anthony (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980), 120–47Google Scholar; and Guy, Jeff, ‘The destruction and reconstruction of Zulu society’, in Marks, Shula and Rathbone, Richard (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London, 1982), 167–94.Google Scholar

²⁶ Guy, Jeff, ‘Gender oppression in southern Africa's precapitalist societies’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 33–47.Google Scholar

²⁷ Simons, H. J., African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Chanock, Martin, ‘Making customary law: men, women and courts in colonial Northern Rhodesia’, in Hay, and Wright, (eds.), African Women and the Law, 53–67Google Scholar; and Chanock, Martin, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar

²⁸ Jo Beall, ‘Women and indentured labour in colonial Natal, 1860–1911’, and Cherryl Walker, , ‘Gender and the development of the migrant labour system, c. 1850–1930’, both in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 146–67 and 168–96.Google Scholar

²⁹ The argument here is drawn particularly from that of Philip Corrigan and Sȧyer, Derek in The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. See particularly the introduction and pages 132–3.

³⁰ Cherryl Walker, ‘The Women's Suffrage Movement: the politics of gender, race and class’, and Brink, Elsabe, ‘Man-made women: gender, class and the ideology of volksmoeder’, both in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 313–45 and 273–92.Google Scholar

³¹ E.g. Moodie, T. Dunbar, ‘Sexuality and migrant labourers on the mines’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, xiv (1987), 228–56.Google Scholar

³² Gaitskell, Deborah, ‘Christian compounds for girls: church hostels for African women in Johannesburg, 1907–1970’, J. Southern Afr. Studies, vi (1979), 44–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaitskell, , ‘Devout domesticity? a century of African women's Christianity in Southern Africa’, and Heather Hughes,‘“A lighthouse for African womanhood”: Inanda Seminary, 1869–1945’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 251–72 and 197–220.Google Scholar

³³ Gaitskell, Deborah and Unterhalter, Elaine, ‘Mothers of the nation: a comparative analysis of nation, race and motherhood in Afrikaner nationalism and the African National Congress’, in Yuval-Davis, Nira and Anthias, Floya (eds.), Woman-Nation-State (London, 1989), 58–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brink, , ‘Man-made women’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 273–92.Google Scholar

³⁴ Eales, Kathy, ‘“Good girls” vs “bad girls”’, Agenda, iv (1989), 1–22Google Scholar; Edwards, Iain, ‘Shebeen queens: illicit liquor and the social structure of drinking dens in Cato Manor’, Agenda, iii (1988), 75–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bonner, Phil, ‘“Desirable or undesirable Basotho women?”: liquor, prostitution and the migration of Basotho women to the Rand, 1920–1945’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 221–50.Google Scholar

³⁵ Walker, Cherryl, ‘Women and gender in Southern Africa: an overview’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 26.Google Scholar

³⁶ Harding, Sandra, ‘The instabilities of the analytical categories of feminist theory’, Signs, xi (1986), 645–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alcoff, Linda, ‘Cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory’, Signs, xiii (1988), 405–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mohanty, ‘Under western eyes’; Riley, Am I That Name ?; and Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.

³⁷ Riley, , Am I That Name?, 7.Google Scholar

³⁸ As mentioned previously, there has been little explicit theoretical focus on state and gender or women in published South African history. There is much more such work referring to other African regions, but most of this would be subject to the same critique. See for example, the recent collection of articles on Women and the State in Africa edited by Parpart, Jane and Staudt, Kathleen (Boulder, 1989)Google Scholar. Both the introduction and the articles represent a range of theoretical perspectives and issues around gender and state, many of which reproduce the externalized relationship that I am depicting here. Margot Lovett, for example, in a useful summary article on ‘Gender relations, class formation, and the colonial State’ that outlines the various ways in which gender relations are both institutionalized and resisted in and through state practices, reduces the understanding of gendered state formation to ‘the differential impacts on women and men’ (p. 23).

³⁹ Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History, 4.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Such interests are not always stated explicitly but can be readily inferred in much of the work on South Africa. See for example, the articles by Walker, ‘Gender and migrant labour’, and Beall, , ‘Women under indentured labour’, in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 168–96 and 146–67.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Wolpe in Race, Class and the Apartheid State and Greenberg in Legitimating the Illegitimate make the point about the non-unitary character of the state with reference to South Africa.

⁴² Randall, Melanie, ‘Feminism and the state: questions for theory and practice’, Resources for Feminist Research, xvii (1988), 13–14Google Scholar, makes the argument for problema-tizing the categories of ‘state’ and ‘women’ in similar terms.

⁴³ Abrams, Philip, ‘Notes on the difficulty of studying the state (1977)’, Journal of Historical Sociology, I (1988), 58–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Poulantzas, Nicos, State, Pozver, Socialism (London, 1978).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Corrigan, and Sayer, , The Great Arch, 4.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Rose, , ‘Beyond the public/private’, 71.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ State theorists have variously accounted for the relationship between that which is formally acknowledged as ‘the state’ and the more extensive domain of ruling: Gramsci with his notion of hegemony, Althusser's ‘ideological state apparatuses’, Foucault's understanding of the dispersion and varieties of disciplinary power. See Lorna Weir's discussion of this point in ‘Studies in the medicalization of sexual danger: sexual rule, sexual politics, 1830–1930’ (Ph.D. thesis, York University, Toronto, 1986), 13–23.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See Gaitskell, ‘Devout domesticity ?’; Hughes, ‘“A lighthouse for African woman-hood”’, and Meintjies, Sheila, ‘Family and gender in the Christian community at Edendale, Natal, in colonial times’; all in Walker, (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, 251–72; 197–220 and 125–45.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ This way of formulating the theoretical question represents an extension of the race-class debate in South African historiography, but it does not shift the terms of that debate.

⁴⁹ Scott, Joan, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, Gender and the Politics of History, 45.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ See the argument of Gaitskell and Unterhalter, ‘Mothers of the nation’.

⁵¹ Scott, , ‘Gender: a useful category’, 47.Google Scholar

⁵² Bozzoli, and Delius, , ‘Radical history’, 32–3.Google Scholar

⁵³ Dubow, Saul, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (Oxford, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, looks at the establishment and institutional development of the Native Administration Department in the inter-war years, importantly tracing the elaboration of the segregationist ideology with reference to the development of thinking around ‘race’. Greenberg, in Legitimating the Illegitimate, looks more contemporarily at the institutions of labour control at their various levels of practice, examining the recent ideological shifts that attempted to legitimate a state whose narrow ruling base makes it inherently illegitimate.

⁵⁴ Chanock, , ‘Writing South African legal history’, 273–4.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ It is perhaps unfair to judge a body of work-in-progress on the basis of its published prospectus only, but it remains striking and indicative of a particular perception of the significance of gender that Chanock, when discussing common law, mentions criminal law, labour law and constitutional law but refers to only the systematic racial differentiation and discrimination in these forms, not those of gender, and also makes no reference to what is called ‘family law’ where patriarchal relations were so obviously constructed.

⁵⁶ See, for example, Smart, Carol, Feminism and the Power of Law (London, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Palmer, Jerry and Pearce, Frank, ‘Legal discourse and state power: Foucault and the juridical relation’, International Journal of the Sociology of the Law, xi (1983), 361–83.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Ashforth, Adam, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar. Ashforth analysed the major commission reports from the South African Native Affairs Commission (1903–5) through to the Manpower Utilization Commission (Riekert, of 1977–80).

⁵⁸ Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar, and ‘The Civic Culture: A philosophic critique’, in The Disorder of Women (Stanford, 1989), 141–78Google Scholar. See Walker, ‘The Women's Suffrage Movement’, for a political history of the struggle for and around the franchise of white women in South Africa.

The masculine abstractions of ‘the white man’ and ‘the black man’ remain the official and everyday terms in which central relations of governance and subjection are signified in South Africa today. The collectivities ‘migrant workers’ and ‘urban blacks’ might appear to be gender-neutral, but their masculinity becomes apparent when women are invoked as a special condition or a designated relation – ‘female migrants’, ‘and his wife’, ‘women-headed households’.

⁵⁹ Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History, 6.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ I am here referring particularly to the work of Ashforth and to that of Martin Chanock as set out in his ‘Prospectus’. There is an increasing body of unpublished work that is exploring similar approaches.

⁶¹ Corrigan, Philip, ‘State formation (entry for a dictionary)’, in Social Forms/Human Capacities (London/New York, 1990), 264Google Scholar. This refocusing reflects the influence of Foucault's approach to analysing power; see particularly ‘The subject and power’, Critical Inquiry, xiii (1982), 777–95Google Scholar; ‘Questions of method’, Ideology and Consciousness, vii (1981), 3–14Google Scholar; and ‘Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness, vi (1979), 5–21Google Scholar. A similar concern with the way in which governance is achieved is found in Dorothy E. Smith's elaboration of the concept ‘relations of rule’ where she looks at the textual mediation of social organization and forms of ruling; see The Conceptual Practices of Power (London, 1990)Google Scholar and Texts, Facts and Femininity (Toronto, 1990).Google Scholar

⁶² Krikler, Jeremy, in a review of Bonner, P., Holmeyr, I., James, D. and Lodge, T. (eds.), Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in 19th and 20th Century South Africa (Johannesburg, 1989)Google Scholar, makes this point strongly, quoting Dunbar Moodie and Colin Bundy as having voiced similar concerns. Bozzoli and Delius more cautiously advocate an advance towards ‘creative theory building as our work matures’ (‘Radical history’, 35). See Krikler, , ‘Waiting for the historians’, South African Review of Books, iii (1990), 16–17.Google Scholar

⁶³ Krikler, in his review, does point to the intellectual tradition of socialist feminism as constituting ‘one of the vital and original components of the social science of the South African Left’ (p. 16), but he gives no indication of how that tradition might be disturbing previous paradigms of historical interpretation. My review has suggested that the socialist feminist tradition has, in the past, tended to be confined largely to inserting women into the historical picture and benignly incorporating their histories into the prevailing marxist theory.