Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee
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women in pre-industrial South Africa.2
This chapter analyses the status of Afrikaner women with particular reference to institutional factors such as the law of inheritance, slavery, and church membership. It also discusses the role Afrikaner women played in the rise of racial domination and anti-imperialism in pre-industrial South Africa. It ends with a brief discussion of the responses of Afrikaner women to the campaign for the vote for women in South Africa.3
English and Roman-Dutch law
An investigation should start with a brief comparison between the English law of inheritance and family law, and Roman-Dutch law in early modern times.
English law
Marriage in English law was all about property, with the husband becoming the owner of the wife’s moveable property. The wife lost all claims to it even if she survived him. A recent study states bluntly that English women enjoyed a status only a little higher than slaves. A husband could beat her as long as the stick was not thicker than his thumb.4 The historian Edmund Morgan formulated the position of women in the American colonies as follows: ‘Women were excluded from any share in formal public power even in the privacy of the family. A woman’s very identity was subsumed in her husband’s; any property she brought into the marriage was his, any debt she owed was his, almost any tort she committed was his.’5 Under the rule of primogeniture, as applied in England and her colonies, the eldest son inherited everything. People in England did, however, have testamentary freedom, and they could leave money and estates to daughters if they so wished, provided that there was no entail. But there was a strong tendency to favour males. What Jane Austen refers to as ‘a daughter’s share’ was characteristically a small portion of the total estate.6
Roman-Dutch law
Roman-Dutch law, as applied in the Netherlands and also at the Cape, went further than other legal codes in recognising that all free people – men and women – had rights. In the words of the great jurist Voetius, it preserved equality and bound the citizens equally. This ‘legalised egalitarianism’ had profound social and political consequences. Among its expressions were a lack of respect for the aristocracy and officialdom, the weakness of ecclesiastical authority, and the absence of clearly demarcated hierarchies.7
Although Britain became master of the Cape Colony early in the nineteenth century, it did not abolish Roman-Dutch law, except for some amendments to the criminal law. Roman-Dutch law was virtually the only legal system in Europe that retained universal community as the basis of matrimonial property, with each partner’s portion merging into the common property. The rule of partible inheritance, applied when one of the partners died, stood in stark contrast to the primogeniture rule. Under partible inheritance, the surviving partner retained half the estate and each child, regardless of sex, inherited an equal portion of the rest. These inheritance portions could be changed in a will but this rarely happened, and no spouse or child could be disinherited of more than half his or her ‘legitimate portion’. The British authorities disliked this rule, but because the Dutch colonists at the Cape considered partible inheritance an intimate part of their culture, they were very reluctant to change it.8
No farm could be subdivided under the loan farm system that held sway under the Dutch East India Company, but the surviving spouse and the children received their share of the property, including the slaves. Afrikaner women normally outlived their partners and many widows gained control over substantial amounts of property consisting of both land and slaves.9 This gave rise to what has been called a ‘widowarchy’. A widow who had been left half the estate of a farmer could consider the options for a subsequent marriage just as an astute modern investment manager today would. Many widowed Cape women remarried several times, thereby accumulating a small fortune.10
The Roman-Dutch law of inheritance also had another important effect. Since each child, regardless of sex, had to receive his ‘legitimate portion’, parents were compelled to divide the farms among them. The subdivision of farms into uneconomical units was widespread. Many families ended up in chronic debt as a result of the mortgaging of land in order to pay out the younger sons and daughters. Often entire farms were sold and the proceeds divided, forcing sons to seek new land elsewhere or become bywoners.
The divorce law that was applied in most of the Netherlands and also at the Cape strengthened the position of women. It provided for several legitimate reasons for divorce or a separation from ‘table and bed’, which effectively annulled the marriage. Among the reasons were adultery, malicious desertion and gross physical cruelty. In the case of divorce, the wife received half of the estate. The wife could also recover the moveable assets donated by a husband to a concubine.11
The status of women under Roman-Dutch law should not be exaggerated, as is revealed by the indignant remark made by Petronella van Heerden, perhaps the first Afrikaner feminist, who came of age just after the South African War. She wrote: ‘[A woman] is classified among children and idiots, when she marries she becomes a minor; she has no control over her things and children, and she could do nothing without the permission of her husband.’12 While hyperbolic, this is not devoid of some truth. A woman who married within community of property in most respects acquired the status of a minor and was subject to the authority of her husband. A father had the final say over the children. There were indeed few legal limits on a husband in the disposal of common assets or the discharging of debts out of the common assets during the existence of the marriage.
First-generation women
The married European women of the first generation were primarily drawn from the Netherlands and their numbers were later supplemented by Huguenot refugees from France. In addition, manumitted slave women made up a sizeable proportion of married women during the seventeenth century.
Dutch women
Women in the Netherlands could sign commercial contracts and notarised documents and could carry on a trade, business or profession without the express consent of their husbands. They were closely involved in their husbands’ jobs, particularly if he was in business or commerce, often enjoying full recognition for their role.13 Many of the first Dutch women at the Cape were from orphanages, but they were not unaware of the relatively strong position of women in the Netherlands. Women could not hold what was called a burgher office, like that of heemraad, or an ecclesiastical office, like that of minister or elder, but when they married burghers they shared the general status of burghers. Their children were considered burghers as well under Roman-Dutch law, which decreed that women enjoyed the status of their husband.
European women at the Cape quickly became active in the hectic trade that characterised the port city. Women received licences to keep guesthouses or taverns or to engage in any other business. C.P. Thunberg, who visited the Cape during the 1770s, wrote: ‘If the father does not trade, but carries on some handicraft business, his wife, daughter or son must.’14 Some European travellers to the Cape were shocked by the rough methods lower-class women used to escape from poverty. In Working Papers in Southern African Studies one wrote: ‘Many of the evil burghers and burgher women (who had come out in male attire as stowaways) milk the poor sailors not only of every penny they own, but when cash runs short seize on anything else they possess.’15
French women
There is no evidence of a distinctive influence exerted by French Huguenot women, but they had behind them a traumatic history of religious persecution and political struggle. This was likely to make them more fiercely determined to resist unjust authority. Without a fatherland to which to return, the Huguenots had to take root or go under. Simon van der Stel, governor at the Cape, soon became disenchanted with the French immigrants, describing them as insolent and inclined to plotting.16
The Huguenots greatly strengthened the pattern of white endogamy that was becoming established at the Cape. When the first party arrived at the Cape in 1688 there was still a severe shortage of European women in the settlement, prompting many men to take half-caste slaves as brides or stable partners outside wedlock. The Huguenots, by contrast, were generally already married when they arrived, and their daughters young and fecund. A cursory glance will show that a surprisingly large proportion of established present-day Afrikaner families had a Huguenot as stammoeder.17
Between 1705 and 1707 women were