Afrikaner Women Under Apartheid: Domesticity, Militancy, and Complicity

The story of apartheid is often narrated through the lens of male politicians, generals, and ideologues. Yet Afrikaner women—teachers, mothers, writers, welfare workers, activists—were indispensable to the building, sustainment, and defense of white supremacy. Their lives were shaped by an ideology that placed them in the domestic sphere, yet that same ideology weaponized their femininity in service of the racial state. Their power was indirect, but their influence was profound. As feminist historian Louise Vincent argues, “Afrikaner nationalism was not only constructed by men; Afrikaner women were central to its sustenance and moral legitimacy.”

 

Afrikaner nationalism—born out of British imperial humiliation and economic insecurity—was family-centered. The farm and the household became symbols of cultural purity. Women were cast as mothers of the volk (the people), tasked with reproducing white identity biologically and culturally. As historian Albert Grundlingh notes, “The Afrikaner ideal of motherhood was not merely private; it was national,” and the female body became “a vessel for the collective future of the volk.”

Afrikaner women’s domestic role was political. The family was the foundation of racial hierarchy. Scholars have repeatedly shown that white women provided the ideological foundation for apartheid at the micro-level: they taught children racial etiquette, policed black servants, and transmitted ethnic pride. Deborah Posel famously described apartheid as a system that “extended the racial order into every corner of the intimate sphere,” and women were its lifelong enforcers.

Unlike British colonial households, which often functioned on elite liberal paternalism, Afrikaner homes turned the private space into a site of ethnic training. Household labor was explicitly racial. Black domestic workers cleaned, cooked, raised Afrikaner children, and slept in backyard “maids’ quarters.” The normality of this relation was central to apartheid’s stability. One cannot understand apartheid without understanding how Afrikaner women internalized the racial division of care and labor. In historian Shula Marks’s words, “Apartheid began at home, in the kitchens and nurseries of white South Africans.”

Through church organizations, women were socialized into ideas of purity, modesty, and obedience. The Dutch Reformed Church promoted a theological narrative: God chose the Afrikaners as a special people, entrusted to preserve a divinely ordained racial order. The home became a site of spiritual guardianship. The mother—pious and modest—was framed as a custodian of God’s chosen race.

 

Domesticity did not mean passivity. Afrikaner women engaged in political militancy, often more fiercely than their male counterparts. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women in concentration camps organized memorial culture, wove nationalist symbols, and shaped Afrikaner collective memory. The British camps during the Second Anglo-Boer War killed 26,000 Afrikaner women and children; this trauma transformed women into national icons and political martyrs. As historian Elizabeth van Heyningen explains, “The concentration camp experience became the foundational myth of Afrikaner nationalist womanhood.”

This myth shaped the politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Afrikaner women organized in cultural societies like the Vroue Nasionale Party (Women’s National Party) and later the Federale Vroue Vereniging (Federation of Afrikaans Women). They led charity drives, taught Afrikaans language, and promoted welfare programs to rescue “poor whites” from urban slums and mines. This was not feminism—it was racial nationalism disguised as uplift. As Deborah Gaitskell observes, Afrikaner women’s activism “was simultaneously maternalist and nationalist, protective and exclusionary.”

Their militancy became ideological. They led schools that taught obedience and racial superiority, policed interracial flirtation, and reinforced the myth that black men were sexual predators. The Afrikaner mother was the shield of the race. Any social change that threatened white supremacy—urbanization, African political mobilization, interracial unions—endangered her children, her home, her identity.

Even in the 1980s, when the apartheid state militarized against internal revolt, many Afrikaner women supported escalated violence while remaining in the domestic realm. As political theorist Xolela Mangcu wrote, white women often rationalized brutality as “necessary to protect the children and the home”—the sacred symbols of Afrikaner nationalism.

 

Afrikaner women were rarely the architects of apartheid policy, but they were indispensable to apartheid practice. Their complicity was structural, not incidental. They administered segregated schools and hospitals, joined conservative women’s leagues, and enforced racial etiquette. They treated apartheid as natural, moral, and inevitable.

Gerda Lerner’s classic insight resonates here: “Oppression thrives not only on the actions of dominating men but on the social conditioning of women who learn to administer domination.” Even when Afrikaner women opposed particular policies, very few questioned the racial hierarchy itself. They often favored “reformist” apartheid rather than abolition. They feared revolution, demographic decline, and loss of privilege.

The paradox becomes visible in the testimony of Afrikaner women interviewed in the 1990s: they saw themselves as victims of politics, not agents of racism. Many claimed to be “just mothers” or “just teachers.” But as scholar Helena Pohlandt-McCormick demonstrates, “The everyday banality of apartheid rested on white women’s authority over African labor, space, and movement.”

This complicity was not passive. It was active endorsement couched in innocence. The domestic sphere sanitized the violence of the racial state. Afrikaner women did not need to wear military uniforms to be militants; they just needed to teach their children that black people were inferior, or reject an interracial neighbor, or call the police on a black worker who didn’t “know his place.”

 

It would be inaccurate to portray Afrikaner women as a monolith. From the 1970s onward, small numbers of Afrikaner feminists broke ranks with nationalist orthodoxy. Figures like Breytenbach’s wife, Yolande, and groups such as Black Sash challenged state brutality and documented forced removals and torture. But even here the critique exposes its limits. Black Sash, dominated by white middle-class women, often framed apartheid as morally wrong but rarely surrendered their own racial privilege. Their dissent existed within a hierarchy they never fully dismantled.

As Professor Cherryl Walker notes, “White women’s activism was carefully negotiated within the bounds of racial privilege, a protest that refused to erode its foundation.”

 

Afrikaner womanhood under apartheid was not simply an oppressed identity within a patriarchal system; it was also a privileged identity within a racial caste. Domesticity, militancy, and complicity formed a triad of power. Afrikaner women raised the future soldiers and bureaucrats of apartheid. They upheld the myth of the chosen nation. They sanctified whiteness in the home, the classroom, the church, and the civic arena.

Their agency was indirect, but their influence ran deep. Louise Vincent’s summation remains the most incisive:
“Afrikaner women did not merely suffer under apartheid; they helped make it possible.”

 

References

Grundlingh, Albert. 1994. “The Meaning of the Women’s Monument: Then and Now.” In Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, edited by Cherryl Walker, 57–75. Cape Town: David Philip.

Gaitskell, Deborah. 1983. “Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity.” In Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa, edited by Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, 251–272. London: Longman.

Gaitskell, Deborah. 1990. “Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–1939.” Journal of African History 24 (2): 241–256.

Heyningen, Elizabeth van. 2007. The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mangcu, Xolela. 2008. To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Marks, Shula. 1992. “Patriotism, Patriarchy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness.” In Gender and History in South Africa, edited by Cherryl Walker, 215–239. Cape Town: David Philip.

Pohlandt-McCormick, Helena. 2000. “I Saw a Nightmare…’: Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976).” History and Theory 39 (4): 23–44.

Posel, Deborah. 1991. The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Walker, Cherryl. 1991. Women and Resistance in South Africa. London: Onyx Press.

Walker, Cherryl. 1990. “Gender and the Development of the Migrant Labour System c.1850–1930.” In Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, edited by Cherryl Walker, 168–196. Cape Town: David Philip.

Vincent, Louise. 2000. “Bread and Honour: White Working-Class Women and Afrikaner Nationalism.” Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (1): 61–78.

Vincent, Louise. 2001. “Reading the Racialised Body: White Women and Apartheid.” African Studies 60 (2): 253–270.