Abstract
Writing histories of girlhood demonstrates the difficulties of researching the history of childhood more generally.1 As a result of contemporary debates about domestic service and the Cape Colony’s alleged labour shortage, there is a surprisingly large amount of material about working-class girls in Cape Town during the late nineteenth century. The archives bulge with information about young, female servants — in official labour and immigration reports, and in private letters about domestic affairs. But the voices of these servant girls are almost entirely absent. They were written about and described by middle-class men and women who usually had very little interest in including the views and opinions of their servants. In comparison, the voices, views and opinions of white, middle-class girls are present not only in their own diaries and journals — which were considered to be significant enough to be kept and preserved in archival collections — but they are present in their parents’ and teachers’ correspondence. Middle-class girls were worth listening to. Working-class maidservants were not.2
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Notes
Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History Agency and Narratives of Childhood,’ The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008), 116.
Peter N. Stearnes, ‘Challenges in the History of Childhood,’ The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008), 36.
Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995), 43–4
Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.
Jaclyn Cock, ‘Domestic Service and Education for Domesticity: The Incorporation of Xhosa Women into Colonial Society’ Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Chenyl Walker (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 76.
Judith Flanders, The Victorian House (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 117.
I.A. Geffen, The Laws of South Africa Affecting Women and Children (Johannesburg: R.L. Esson, 1928), xxxix
Martin Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936: Fear, Favour, and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 201.
Robert Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), 222–6.
Deborah Gaitskell, ‘“Christian Compounds for Girls”: Church Hostels for African Women in Johannesburg, 1907–1970,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 6, no. 1 (1979), 45–56.
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© 2014 S.E. Duff
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Duff, S.E. (2014). The Jam and Matchsticks Problem. In: Moruzi, K., Smith, M.J. (eds) Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356352_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356352_9
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