Too often, the emigration of women has been treated as an adjunct to that of men, especially in the case of families travelling together. In significant ways, however, the emigration of single women from Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries was distinct from the general movement. It was rooted, in the main, in those features of British society peculiar to their sex, and also in conditions in the colonies that made the venture possible for them. What factors would cause a woman to leave all she has known for the uncertainty and danger of a 'wild' colony half a world away? How did these women adapt to the unique circumstances of life in southern Africa? These are some of the questions addressed by the author, herself the daughter of an emigrant couple, in this fascinating book. The author not only explores the larger issues of single women's emigration to southern Africa, but also presents the compelling experiences of individual women, as seen through documents by them and people who knew them.

The real lives of servants in the second half of the twentieth century.

A fascinating glimpse of life below stairs, This book tells the stories of the lives the people who lived and worked there.

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. Scholars and activists denounce compromised forms of citizenship that expose these women to at times shocking exploitation and abuse.In From Servants to Workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's "miraculous" transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernize paid domestic work through state regulation. Instead of undergoing a dramatic transformation, servitude relations stubbornly resisted change. Ally locates an explanation for this in the tension between the forms of power deployed by the state in its efforts to protect workers, on the one hand, and the forms of power workers recover through the intimate nature of their work, on the other.Listening attentively to workers' own narrations of their entry into democratic citizenship-rights, Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labor. From Servants to Workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialize.

Perry examines the efforts of a loosely connected group of reformers to transform a colonial environment into one that more closely adhered to the practices of respectable, middle-class European society.

The founder and president of the Mothers' Union, one of the first and largest women's organisations, Mary Sumner (1828-1921) was an influential educator and a force to be reckoned with in the Church of England of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the analytical tools of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Sue Anderson-Faithful locates Mary Sumner's life and thought against social and religious networks in which she was restricted by gender yet privileged by class and proximity to distinguished individuals. This dichotomy is key to understanding the achievements of a woman who both replicated and shaped Victorian attitudes to women's roles in society. To Mary Sumner mission and education meant the propagation of religious knowledge through progressive pedagogy. Her activism was intended to promote social reform at home and nurture the growth of the British Empire with mothers wielding their political power as educators of future citizens. The symbiotic relationship between Church and State concentrated power in the hands of a ruling class with which Mary Sumner identified and which she supported. In her view the legitimacy of national and imperial rule was intertwined with the moral force of Anglicanism. SueAnderson-Faithful interprets Mary Sumner's lifelong work in the light of these relationships, contrasting her assertion of personal agency and an empowering discourse of motherhood with her simultaneous reinforcement of patriarchy and class privilege.

This book examines writing which is concerned with the period of the ‘poor white problem’ and the ‘poor white solution’ (1870s–1940s) in Southern Africa. It argues that ‘poor white’ is not a narrow economic category, but describes those who threaten to collapse boundaries—racial, sexual, and class boundaries. It studies four writers who migrate between Britain and Southern Africa, who engage with the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution,’ and who foreground ambiguity in their ambiguously genred texts. Olive Schreiner and Doris Leasing highlight the ‘problem’ as they embrace the threat posed by poor whites, while Robert Tressell and Daphne Anderson foreground the ‘solution’ as they argue for the incorporation of the poor into imperial myths about white homogeneity and upward mobility. Based on an historical approach, this book explores three premises. The first premise is that poor white is a liminal category, that it encompasses economic failures and social transgressors. The second premise is that Southern African life writing engages with its historical and political moment. The third premise is that philanthropy is central to the articulation of the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution.’ The final concluding chapter reflects upon the re-emergence of poor whiteism since the end of Apartheid and the collapse of Zimbabwe, and reflects upon the problem of black poverty.