The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

tution could provide. The risks involved were stigmatisation and being
expelled from the suburb, or worse: the women could be, for instance,
branded as unfit mothers.
In spite of possible negative consequences, the archival material has an
abundance of examples of women’s slipping morals. They were labelled
sexually deviant, bad mothers or bad housekeepers. In the archival files
the social workers often described these women as slovenly, nervous or
in the worst case, hysterical. The ethos seemed to be that if the women
could not handle the toughness of their lives, there had to be something
wrong with them.
These developments and ideals lead to the category of a sexually pure
’proper woman’ becoming well internalised, and rarely questioned by
women themselves. If a woman resisted the positive volksmoeder model
role, she risked being perceived as leaning towards the negative stereotype
of a whore. Thus the concept of volksmoeder, initially tempting and
empowering, further ossified the gender roles in the area. 128
In addition to time-consuming demands to work hard and be proper,
all the residents were presumed to have productive leisure. Organising
the residents’ leisure was an important part of the social workers’ initial
task description. Planned leisure would ensure that the tenants would not
engage in any counter-productive activities, but instead divide their free
time between sport, church and gardening.
Extensive club work was organised from the start. In the 1930s and
1940s leisure activities were organised by gender. There were boys’
clubs to boost male socialisation, and the social workers did their best to
awaken the ladies’ interests in sewing and decorating.
For men there was sport and garden work, for women there was guidance
in good housekeeping and care of their children. The women were
constantly educated to become more moral and skilful people. Educational
movies were shown weekly at the community hall, and the domestic
science 129 students from the universities of Stellenbosch and Cape Town
visited and taught them household and gardening skills. There were lectures
on medical topics: child health and children’s diseases, and lectures
on handicrafts and cooking.
128 Dworkin (1983) examines the allure of the political ultra-right, and its promises to
women of conservative families who would otherwise be bound to total powerlessness.
By giving a selected few women a task and a seeming purpose in life, it recruits them to
work for a repressive power structure, which, in the long run, tends to deny women their
rights.
129 Home Economics.
139