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CHAPTER 4

EKURHULENI’S INSUBORDINATE WOMEN 1918-1945

Women’s resistance in Germiston

In the inter-war years, sections of both black and white women found themselves in a similar predicament in South Africa generally and in Ekurhuleni in particular, even though each group’s life chances and circumstances diverged radically in certain respects, and white women shared uncomplainingly in the structure of exploitation that white society as a whole imposed on its black subjects. The interwar period was the time when women – both black and white – emerged as an increasingly conspicuous component of South African society and, in a hitherto unprecedented way, made their voices and their presences felt. Nowhere was this truer than in Ekurhuleni, which emerged as one of the prime sites, if not the prime site of women’s struggle for equal rights and better lives in South Africa. Here the collectively subordinate position of both white and black women to men was challenged earlier and more vigorously than in any other part of the land.

Many white women entered work during the war

WHITE WOMEN’S POLITICS

White women entered the political limelight first as noted in Chapter 2. By the common decision of white men (with only the Prime Minister of Natal dissenting) in the negotiations leading up to the Act of Union in 1910, white women were denied the vote in national, provincial and local elections. The common view among white men at this time was that a woman’s place was in the home and that they should not leave this private space to enter the public arena.¹ The first place and the first sphere of activity in which they accomplished this shift was in the field of philanthropy and social work, with Afrikaner women becoming particularly active in the face of the social ravages and the part collapse of the Afrikaner family which followed the South African War of 1899–1902.² Social dislocation (often manifesting itself in the excessive consumption of alcohol which was a characteristic feature of the Rand at this time) prompted white women (in this case mainly English speaking and middle class) to join a recently established organisation, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. This was soon to have a massive effect on the Rand, as they waged extremely effective temperance campaigns at the beginning of World War I and again in the 1920s.

The gradual breach of the public sphere by white women was in a large part the product of social and economic change. As industrialisation and urbanisation accelerated more and more white (and, as we shall see, black) women were becoming urban. At the same time, World War I marked a major shift in white occupation or job structure. From this point on women entered in increasing numbers into industrial employment and into some professions. This was especially pronounced on the Rand. Women began to organise themselves in new collective forms. From the end of World War I women’s organisations (which were led by mainly urban English middle-class women) campaigned for the opening up of the hitherto ‘masculine’ fields of science, law and medicine to university-educated women. This they gradually achieved, but the journey was hard and long. To take one example, in 1923, after a lengthy campaign in which the Women’s Enfranchisement Association of the Union (WEAU) took an active part, statutory bars on women entering the legal profession were removed by Parliamentary Act.³ Simultaneously on the Rand, as will be discussed below, Afrikaner women began entering the garment, clothing, sweet, tobacco and service industries in growing numbers and joined trade unions active in these fields. Finally, as noted earlier, a Women’s Reform League founded in 1911 campaigned for the female municipal franchise which they secured in 1913.

This threefold thrust of women into the public sphere steadily weakened male resistance to the full enfranchisement of women. It was among the Afrikaner National Party that the critical change of attitude took place. In their case, the mass movement of Afrikaner women into the cities and industrial employment prompted a re-evaluation of their previously implacably hostile opposition to the women’s vote.⁴ Since Ekurhuleni was in the forefront of this process (as is discussed below), it is to Ekurhuleni working Afrikaner women that much of the credit for this shift of attitude is due. In addition the National Party, under the leadership of J.B. Hertzog, began to recognise the value of white women’s votes in diluting the Cape African franchise, and allowing them to ram through their programme of wholesale segregation. Accordingly Hertzog finally introduced a bill enfranchising the white women of the Union in 1929.⁵

INSURGENT AFRIKANER WOMEN

The large-scale entry of Afrikaner women into Ekurhuleni was driven by a combination of rural distress and urban opportunity. In the Ekurhuleni drought of 1916, for example, which seared much of the country, tens of thousands of ‘bywoners’ and their families were uprooted from the land, over 4 000 of whom sought employment on the Rand. Again in the great droughts of the early 1930s an even larger flood of poor whites poured into the same area, a large number of whom were young Afrikaner women.⁶ Industrial expansion and the growth of employment opportunities more generally on the Rand offered some hope of relief. Davies records the numbers of white workers employed nationally, but mostly on the Rand, in secondary industry as rising from 66 000 in 1911 to 88 844 in 1915 and 124 702 in 1919–1921.⁷ The latter was the fruit of war-time isolation. From 1925 the expansion of industry continued at an even faster rate, in response to protective tariffs which were imposed by the Pact Government to aid selected secondary industries. Again the bulk of this growth was centred on the Rand. White women were the principal beneficiaries of this surge of import substituting light industrial growth especially in the food, drink, tobacco, clothing and textiles, books and printing, and leather ware sectors. The ‘civilised labour’ policies adopted by the Pact Government in 1924 required that tariff protection under the Tariff Act of 1925 should only be extended to industries employing whites. What it did not specify, however, was what gender they should be, and since the Wage Board (set up again in 1925) from the start accepted a male/female differential ‘without question’ in the wages it set, deeming that white women needed only to support themselves (and not a family like white men) and so could be paid at a rate which was governed by considerations similar to black (migrant) men. Many factories ‘hitherto employing non-Europeans were now endeavouring to staff their factories with Europeans (women) only’ reported the Chief Inspector of Factories in 1926. The number of women employed in industrial jobs accordingly trebled between 1927 and 1936, while those employed as shop assistants doubled.⁸ By 1924, 48% of the industrial workforce was made up of women, rising to a remarkable 73% in 1935.⁹ During the depression years the bias towards white women was particularly pronounced as they were in the only category of industrial employees whose number increased. Only subsequently, in the industrial boom of the late 1930s, did men of all races fare better.¹⁰ This to a large extent accounts for the preponderance of white (mainly Afrikaner) women on the Rand.

Much of this increase in women’s factory employment occurred in Ekurhuleni, above all in Germiston. In 1917 Germiston Council had the foresight to lay out two industrial townships, taking credit for being the first local authority in South Africa to take such a step. It quickly proved to be a prescient move. In 1921 five out of 12 gold mines in the Germiston area closed and ceased production, to be followed by two more in 1922. Now the secondary industries which had been attracted by the town stepped in to take up the slack. By 1918 the Victoria Falls and Transvaal Power Station had been erected in one of Germiston’s industrial townships as had a number of engineering works. In 1921 the Rand Gold Refinery was also erected close by which was soon processing a huge three-quarters of the gold mined in the world. By the early 1920s numerous small tailoring concerns had also opened business in Germiston’s industrial parks to be followed by some of the largest clothing factories on the Reef, such as the New York and the Germiston and East Rand clothing factories. Food, printing, chemical and leather ware factories joined the throng both here and later in other Ekurhuleni towns.¹¹

By 1934 it was being reported by the Department of Labour that:

The future prosperity of Germiston depends on its industries, the principal of which is ready made clothing. Now eight factories all work to capacity employing 1 000 Europeans (mainly women) and 150 natives.¹²

Afrikaner women were in the vanguard of this move. Afrikaner families came to town to take advantage of their children’s (and especially their daughters’) wage-earning opportunities. Many single rural Afrikaner women took this course because poverty at home drove them there to support themselves (15% in one survey) or to support dependants in their former homes. Another survey conducted in 1932 found one-fifth of Afrikaner women acting as sole-breadwinners in families averaging four to five members while over one-third belonged to family groups with no male wage-earner recorded. The poorest, most recent arrivals found themselves trapped in the least desirable jobs such as domestic service and sweat shops. Only a fifth of their number managed to secure factory work. Most of these Afrikaner women factory workers had been born or lived ten years in the town. The majority were young and single and only worked until they were married and could be supported (or do out-work at home).¹³ Prior to this they were often compelled to live in the most miserable circumstances, as the wages they received were insufficient to cover lodging, food and transportation. Such women survived by finding cheap lodgings where they might sleep three or four to a bed, or share premises with men, and lived only on dry bread and coffee. This left them vulnerable in a whole host of ways. Illness from malnutrition was not uncommon.¹⁴ To obtain supplementary income it appears that many resorted to what Freed termed ‘amateur prostitution’ – a full half of them, according to Freed, in 1938.¹⁵ From the late 1910s and especially the 1920s a moral panic began to take hold on the Rand about white Afrikaner women’s prostitution, promiscuity, racial mixing in the Rand’s multiracial slums, and factory work. Arduous factory work (along with bread-line wages) were claimed to weaken Afrikaner women’s physical and moral powers leading to sexual immorality. The prime sign or symbol of such degeneration was venereal diseases whose rates soared among poorer whites in this period.¹⁶

Exploited, denied self-respect, pejoratively labelled ‘factory meide’, and suspected of lacking moral disciplines of all kinds, these young Afrikaner women who flocked to Ekurhuleni faced an uphill struggle in the town, and were always threatened with sliding down into a material and moral abyss.¹⁷ A major source of support allowing them to haul themselves out of this hole was the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU). Known as the Witwatersrand Tailors’ Association for most of the 1920s, this underwent a change of name (to the GWU) and of organisational style once Solly Sachs was elected General Secretary in 1928. It then transformed itself into one of the most powerful and militant industrial unions on the Rand, enrolling 80–100% of white female workers in the industry for most of this time and waging a series of strikes which would ultimately lead to significant improvements in wages and living conditions and rescue these workers from the ever-present threat of destitution. In a sequence of strikes in 1928–1929 and 1931–1932, the women members of the GWU caught the popular imagination of the Rand either for the colourful and exuberant style of their strike (bright colours, gay processions of music and dancing, according to the Rand Daily Mail) or for their fearsome confrontational militancy (‘Wild Women’) which struck an equal measure of fear and alarm into the Rand Daily Mail’s readers. Of the two, the 1931 strike was more effective. In Germiston in 1931 exciting scenes were reported as ‘a huge demonstration of workers paraded in the streets ... carrying a big red banner before them and flaunting red dresses, red rosettes and red ties everywhere’. Both the strikes of 1931 and 1932 took place in the midst of the recession. The first was barely drawn, the second was devastatingly lost. After this the GWU lay in ruins until painstakingly put together again from the shop floor upwards by Solly and his chief lieutenants, Johanna Cornelius and Anna Scheepers. In an amazing turn-about it had largely recovered by 1934.¹⁸

Striking garment workers

The GWU was remarkable and pioneering for its militancy, for its capacity to mobilise Afrikaner women, and for the cross-racial co-operation it achieved with the black South African Clothing Workers’ Union (SACWU). This relationship was not without its contradictions since Afrikaner women members continued to practise social discrimination against blacks, and insisted that black workers be organised in a separate, parallel structure.¹⁹ The arm’s length co-operation that resulted, however, was a real step towards multi/non-racial unionism, broke down racial prejudices among a generation of Afrikaner female GWU leaders, nurtured the militant black leadership in the SACWU which would make a major mark on the political scene (see Chapter 6), and opened up a space which would be more widely exploited during World War II.

One last multi-racial trade union flourish would take place in Ekurhuleni in the middle years of the war. This was among female and African male shop workers who belonged to the National Union of Distributive Workers and its parallel, the African Commercial and Distributive Workers Union, and who worked in the large chain stores like Ackermans, Woolworths and OK Bazaars that had first rose to prominence in the 1920s. In 1943 a strike, which arose from a dispute over wages, working conditions and trade union rights, broke out. It lasted 17 days and was responsible for 39 853 days lost in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and other industrial centres. In much the same way as was the case with the Afrikaner female and African male workers of the Garment Workers’ Union it brought out both white and black workers in a remarkable display of multi-racial unity, through which it won most of its demands.²⁰

Germiston was thus in the vanguard of two developments which would transform the Ekurhuleni area. The first was secondary industrialisation, which before long would offer a new lifeline to all Ekurhuleni’s towns as gold mining went into decline, and it could assume its position as ‘the workshop of the Rand’. The second was the rise of industrial trade unionism in secondary industry, initially spearheaded by Solly Sachs and the Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers’ Union, but later developing into a multi-racial trade union movement, which is discussed in Chapter 7.

THE LOSS OF SOCIAL CONTROL: BLACK WOMEN

From the 1920s a substantial stream of African women were also arriving in the Ekurhuleni towns, which by the late 1930s had grown into something close to a torrent. The first major influx occurred during and immediately after World War I. A census conducted at the end of 1921, for example, disclosed the numbers and proportions of men to women shown in Table 2.²¹

Table 2: Census results, 1921

		No. of houses	Men	Women	Children	Total
Germiston	Georgetown	612	750	700	2 020	3 470
Boksburg	Location No. 1	502	710	675	675	2 060
	Location No. 2	139	170	140	160	470
Benoni	Municipal location	459	540	546	1 641	2 727
Springs	Government farm	410	662	753	1 249	2 664

These figures already reflected relatively equal proportions of women to men – which suggests they were living in family units, with growing numbers of children. Women were in many senses able to fly under the official radar since they were not required to carry passes, and were free either to join genuine husbands or to claim one from part of the black urban community’s floating male population on occasions when their right to remain in an urban area was challenged. As a result a growing number of single or ‘unattached’ women, many displaced by tightening restrictions on black farm labourer families on white farms, made their way to the towns.²² The ingredients for two decades of conflict and two decades of black women’s self-assertion and independence were, in this manner, set in place.

The first national effort to regain control of the country’s black urban populations, which was inspired above all by the perceived problems on the Rand, was the (Natives) Urban Areas Act of 1923. The principal thrust of the Act was to implement urban racial segregation which required the removal of Africans from inner city mixed residential areas and slums.²³ In this it substantially failed across Ekurhuleni. The second purpose of the Act was to provide relatively standardised location regulations for the new locations which had been established all across the Reef, through which it intended to bring those populations under close surveillance and control. This object was frustrated above all by the agency of black urban women, despite amendments to the Act passed in 1930 and 1937 which attempted both to restrict the entry of black urban women (and secondarily men) and to secure the removal of those designated ‘idle and dissolute’.²⁴ The extent of the failure of these measures can be gauged by the rate of increase of black women resident in Ekurhuleni’s towns in the 1920s which ranged from 58.6% in Brakpan to 158.9% in Germiston.²⁵ New standardised Reef-wide location regulations aimed at containing this process and its effects were drafted in 1925, but then were repeatedly overturned by legal challenges which were in most cases sponsored by black urban women. One of the most tumultuous, enduring and successful areas of such contestation were the Ekurhuleni towns. Here the primary objection expressed to the new regulatory regime was towards lodgers’ registration and lodgers’ fees. These not only imposed a generalised economic burden, along with more effective control, but were also levied on the adult (i.e. post 18 or 21 years old) sons and daughters of location resident site holders. This provision was particularly and deeply offensive to Reef location women and spurred them into a variety of confrontations with the authorities over the next few years. Initially location residents turned to the law and in a series of highly successful Supreme Court challenges had location regulations overturned (mainly on technicalities) as ultra vires.²⁶ Depression added a further edge to the conflict, as can be seen most vividly in Germiston’s Dukathole location. As employment shrank in Germiston’s clothing factories, arrear rentals accumulated on an unprecedented scale. The financial penalty represented by the 2 shillings lodger fee, which even adult sons and daughters had to pay, seemed to grow day by day. Among the most vulnerable to these pressures were widowed site holders, and it was they, along with many of the other women in Germiston’s location, who then decided to seize the initiative themselves. According to Sofia Koerkop, a widow and domestic worker, who had lived 29 years in Germiston’s location, a Wives’ Association had long been active in the location. When the court challenges to the permit system began in 1927 these women and wives were among the most active in collecting subscriptions and in supporting the campaign. However, as Sofia Koerkop and many other women in the location increasingly saw it, the anti-lodger fees campaign had been badly mishandled. The money was wholly controlled by men and had twice disappeared. In addition, they claimed, all that the men seemed to do was to speak to the Council and get no reply. Sofia Koerkop and the other leading figures in the Wives’ Association, therefore, decided in the middle of 1930 to take matters into their own hands and to form the Women’s League of Justice (WLJ), whose primary targets would henceforth be lodger permits and increasingly common and invasive police raiding for illicit liquor (which was again produced by the location’s women). The WLJ was composed predominantly but not exclusively of women. Its active supporters/members numbered between one and two thousand, a few dozen of whom were men. For the next three years the WLJ was to be the pre-eminent, though not unchallenged, political force in the locations whose confrontations with the location administration would ultimately bring matters in the location to crisis point. In June 1933, for example, 1 026 WLJ members marched on the Town Council offices. At a climactic meeting in January 1933, which would ultimately disintegrate into riot, between one and two thousand women were present.²⁷

Woman beer brewer

The struggle for Germiston location was exceptional but not atypical. It was exceptional because nowhere on the Rand did such an intense protracted and feminine political struggle unfold. At the same time it bore resemblance to many other low level political insurgencies that were in the process of emerging elsewhere in Ekurhuleni by condensing a number of their characteristic features in a particularly potent and concentrated form. The most noteworthy of these conflicts took place in Brakpan, Benoni and Springs. As in Germiston it was the issues of permits and brewing that were the main bones of contention in these neighbouring towns. Among the various repercussions of the great depression on the area was a massive increase in the illicit brewing of liquor and a perceptible rise in drunkenness, violence and social disorder. In response, most municipalities tried to tighten up their policing of liquor brewing and liquor selling.²⁸ Among the first salvos to be fired in this offensive was the introduction of the pick-up van (or lorry). In the 1920s the lorry had opened up many parts of Africa to capitalist penetration. In the 1920s it played the same role in many of South Africa’s municipal locations by exposing them to much more invasive policing and control. The principal virtues of the pick-up van appear to have been that it increased police mobility and allowed the same number of men to make many more arrests. For this reason it was widely hated among the Witwatersrand’s African communities. It upset what had seemed to be a relatively stable and acceptable balance between the police and those placed under their control. Complaints about the pick-up van first appear early in 1933. From that point on pick-ups were used extensively against permit and liquor law offenders. So ubiquitous and invasive did the pick-up become that it was taken up as one of the central planks of the Communist Party of South Africa’s (CPSA) Reef political campaigns during the 1930s. In 1933 the CPSA organised a conference to oppose unemployment, beer raids and the pick-ups among other things, followed by a mass demonstration in December under the slogan ‘to hell with the pick-up and police brutality’.²⁹

Besides the pick-up, the municipalities deployed a variety of other weapons against the perceived evil of illicit brewing. Practically all the Witwatersrand municipalities increased their police complement either temporarily or permanently, with the principal objective of rooting out this menace, while both the Brakpan and Springs municipalities built fences round their locations in 1934 and 1937 respectively, to deny the access of mine workers to the liquor brewers of their locations. At a conference convened in 1935 the Reef municipalities went further and urged the government to enact an integrated package of measures which would confer on them the powers necessary to establish control over their location populations. These found legislative expression in the Native’s Laws Amendment Act of 1937, which provided for the control of influx and the removal of idle and undesirable men and women, as well as virtually requiring the construction of municipal beer halls and the municipal monopolisation of beer production and beer sales.³⁰