Meghan Healy

The first all-female school for southern Africans, and one of few mission schools to evade nationalization by the apartheid state, Inanda Seminary has been an integral institution for nearly a century and a half. Meghan's dissertation, “African Women’s Schooling and the Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa, 1869 to Recent Times,” offers the first social history of Inanda, and with it a political history of South African education that reveals the gendered contradictions on which a racially-divided society hinged. Historians have paid extensive attention to the rise, fall, and resistance of educated black South African men. But they have almost entirely ignored the most remarkable facet of southern African educational history: From the nineteenth-century mineral revolution through apartheid, African women attended school at rates equal to or slightly higher than African men, in an inversion of the continent’s general pattern. This study demonstrates that this distinctive history was central to the formation and demise of a racialized state: Educated African women, from Inanda and its peers, made “separate development” initially possible and ultimately unsustainable. It is here that Meghan's dissertation crucially advances our understanding of race, gender, and development.

African women’s education responded to core crises of social reproduction in a society predicated on the expropriation of black land and male migrant labor. In the years before apartheid, African women and men, missionaries, and state officials agreed that African women needed education to perpetuate their race, as mothers, wives, and nurturing professionals. Policy-makers and teachers formulated a gendered curriculum that prepared girls to run households and community institutions on a financial shoestring, while boys prepared to work as laborers or professionals in segregated communities. When apartheid officials came to power in 1948, they needed the skills of an African middle-class to govern. But they needed to undermine this class politically to rule. This tension between governance and rule came to a head in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which sought to resolve these contradictions through a gendered educational strategy: Officials emphasized the training of African women as teachers and nurses, while they attempted to limit African men’s political agitation by nationalizing most coeducational or all-male mission schools. Bantu Education thus not only narrowed African men’s educational options. Apartheid educational policy also made new space for women’s schooling-- at Inanda, which became the most prestigious school for black women, and across South Africa.

Drawing upon a rich body of official, missionary, and personal papers from South Africa and the United States, as well as some forty oral interviews with Inanda affiliates, Meghan's study demonstrates that African women seized the limited space that educational policies opened to them. From the interstices of a racialized patriarchy, women at Inanda and peer schools struggled to forge democratic, gender-egalitarian relations in their lives. Increasingly from the 1960s, educated African women subverted white visions of black subservience and marginalization in South African society, belying official rationales for “separate development” by their self-assertion in an expanding range of public fora. Women thus mobilized their central roles in social reproduction to effect social and political transformations.