11:30 - 13:00
Oral session
Room: Muirhead – Room 118
Stream: The Social Fabric of Whites in Southern Africa: A Historical Perspective of White Society
Chair/s:
Abraham Mlombo
The Centrality of Wage Labour to the Construction and Performance of Class, Gender and Race in the Settler Colonial Context: White Masculinity and Femininity at Work in Southern Rhodesia, 1920-1980
Nicola Ginsburgh
University of Warwick, Coventry

The position of white farmers in ongoing struggles over land and inequality in Zimbabwe has produced a number of innovative studies on settler identity and power in recent years. While important, this focus on rural whiteness has had tended to homogenise settler experiences and distort what has historically been a predominantly urban settler population. By examining the gendered experiences of white working class men and women under the period of minority rule this paper seeks to consider the ways in which racial supremacy was forged and claimed in the city and the industrial workplace. Broadly, this paper examines struggles over work, male unemployment and female wage labour and argues that this provides insight into competing constructions of social identities, their reworkings and subversions; the panics and anxieties that result from perceived aberrations to normative social behaviours; and the attempts to impose or reinstate social hierarchies. By examining successive Rhodesian censuses and journals produced by male-dominated European trade unions this paper charts white women's employment rates and the types of work women performed over the period of minority rule as well as the reactions of a layer of white working class men as the numbers of white women entering wage labour increased. In doing so it will explore the ways in which white women's experiences of wage labour in Southern Rhodesia variously confirmed and challenged hegemonic ideals of white womanhood and indicate the ways in which white working class masculinity and femininity was constructed and performed through work.


Reference:
Tu-A51 Social Fabric of Whites in Southern Africa-P-004
Presenter/s:
Nicola Ginsburgh
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Muirhead – Room 118
Chair/s:
Abraham Mlombo
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
12:15 - 12:30
Session times:
11:30 - 13:00