A World of Their Own A History of South African Women’s Education / Meghan Healy-Clancy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Healy-Clancy, Meghan, author.

Series:

Reconsiderations in southern African history.

Reconsiderations in southern African history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education--South Africa--History--20th century.

Education.

Women--Political activity--South Africa--History.

Women.

Women--Education--South Africa--History.

Black people--Education.

Black people.

South Africa--Politics and government--20th century.

South Africa.

Inanda Seminary (Inanda, South Africa).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 pages) : illustrations, photographs.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2014

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students' experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women's social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education-introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

Contents:

Social reproduction in the making of a 'benevolent empire' : 1835-1885

Domestic revolutions and the feminisation of schooling in Natal : 1885-1910

New African women's work in segregationist South Africa : 1910-1948

Education policy and the gendered making of separate development : 1948-1976

Educated African women in a time of political revolution : 1976-1994

Epilogue.

Notes:

Revised version of the author's dissertation--Harvard University, 2011.

"Originally published in 2013 by the University of KwaZulu- Natal Press"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780813936093

0813936098

OCLC:

875640595