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The late 20th century saw a steep rise in published works on gender in South Africa. This article analyses the production of gender research against a backdrop of current interest in southern theory, theory that is produced to analyse and challenge existing global knowledge inequalities. As a domain of research, South African gender writings draw both on global feminist impulses as well as national and local ones. We discuss what this means for understanding the particularity of South Africa’s gender scholarship which we trace back to the writings of Olive Schreiner at the beginning of the 20th century. In this paper we quantitatively identify the trajectory of gender research in South Africa and consider the genealogy of South African feminist writing. We show how the focus of gender research evolved noting that it sometimes was divided on grounds of race, but often was united by opposition to patriarchy which took forms of activist scholarship. We focus on a number of themes to show how feminist scholarship developed out of engagements with questions of inequality, race, class and gender. While gender research featured a strong, almost obsessive, engagement with local, South African issues which serve to give this body of work its cohesion, it also manifested divisions that reflected the very inequalities being researched.

2004, The Nordic Africa Institute, PO Box 1703, SE–751 47, Uppsala, Sweden, www.nai.uu.se 276 pagesPaperback: ISBN 91-7106-513-x, €22, £16.95 Journal of Psychology in Africa 2004, 14(2): 151–152

First edition, printed version 2003Second edition, electronic version 2018

Bibliography: leaves 163-172., This study explores changes in the way that Drum magazine constructed manhood from the first edition of 1951 to its sale in 1984. The exploration is undertaken from a feminist post modern perspective that sees gender as a social construct and masculinity as a complex and multifaceted identity that is actively and creatively produced by men in relation to women and through the intersections with other identities such as sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity. I argue that Drum's constructions of the masculinity of black men were infused with both black and white notions of race and sex, informed by both western and African discourses of gender. At times these different discourses were in competition, at other times they were more compatible; together they shaped the representations of manhood found in Drum, which in turn helped legitimise and normalise particular ways of being a man in mid to late twentieth century South Africa.

Bibliography: pages 201-215., This study provides a feminist perspective on aspects of change in white women's lives in South Africa between 1960 and 1990. Changing patterns of women's work, where work encompasses unpaid domestic labour as well as paid employment outside the home, are traced. The different ways in which women have combined their socially defined obligations as wives and mothers, as employees or employers, are considered. The primary sources used include open-ended interviews with women, magazines and the publications of women's organisations. The period 1960-1973 was one in which most white women left the paid labour force after marrying. Towards the end of the period, in the context of a booming economy and a perceived shortage of skilled white labour, more white wives were remaining in employment after marriage. The media, women's organisations, the state, big business and white male workers were addressing, in different ways, the conflict between white wives entering paid employment and the necessity to protect traditional values whereby 'good' wives stayed at home. 1974-1984 saw large and increasing numbers of white wives taking up paid work, both part-time and full-time. The period saw employed wives becoming increasingly commonplace, while the range of occupations open to them expanded. Observing that most remained in the lower levels of corporate hierarchies, women's organisations focused on eliminating the 'glass ceilings' said to block women's entry to higher paid positions. By 1985-1990, women were encouraged to be ambitious, assertive and to strive for self-fulfilment through their careers. The conflict of trying to achieve in the male dominated business world, combined with a sexual division of labour that persisted in defining the home and the family as women's work, saw many women leave the work place to start up home-based businesses.