Only in SA could allowing women to vote take democracy backwards
Among the first South Africans to call for equal rights for women was author Olive Schreiner, who said they were reduced “like the field tick to the passive exercise of their sex functions alone”. Her 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm raised many a male eyebrow.
In 1892 a call to enfranchise women was made in the Cape House of Assembly. The prime minister John X Merriman, writes Prof Cherryl Walker,
“drew cheers and laughter with a speech which mixed folk sayings and scripture to condemn the proposal out of hand. He cautioned that ‘women’s counsel and brandy are two capital things, but you must use them very cautiously’, and invoked ‘God Almighty [who] had made the sexes separate’.”
A lot had changed by the time women were granted the vote in 1930. Senator TC Visser was ridiculed for saying “it was a scientific fact that the development of a woman’s brain stopped at a stage beyond which a man’s brain went on”. The Cape Times called him a “shallow thinker” whose claims were “grossly unscientific”.
Seeing he was out of step with public opinion, senator CJ Langenhoven (of Die Stem fame) agreed to vote in favour. But not before having it recorded that doing so would remain a “burden upon his memory and his conscience for the remaining days of his life”. Langenhoven argued that the bill was “a movement away from the home” as a woman who “occupied a professional position ... kept a man out of a position, shirked the responsibility of marriage and prevented a man from marrying because he did not earn the income which would make it possible for him to marry”.
But these men were in the minority. The ease with which the Women’s Enfranchisement Act sailed through the house (73 to 34) and the senate (30 to 6) showed unabashed chauvinism was on the decline. Such a resounding result should have been a step forward for our democracy. Instead, the act dealt a huge blow to all men and women of colour in SA.
At the time significant numbers of coloured and black men were still able to vote in the Cape province — much to the annoyance of JBM Hertzog, the segregationist Prime Minister.
By the 1920s the argument had become less about whether women should be granted the vote and more about which women should be enfranchised. In its early years the overwhelmingly English-speaking middle-class women’s suffrage movement embraced the idea of equal rights for all men and women.
But it was clear this line of argument wouldn’t get the suffrage movement anywhere. As National Party MP Brand Wessels said in 1926: “We who are opposed to women’s suffrage are opposed to it not on account of the unfitness of women, but on the grounds of the difficulty in the coloured and native vote.” The Transvaal branch of the women’s National Party put it even more bluntly in 1928 by announcing : “Die vrou wil nie saam met die k ***** stem nie.”
Sexism in parliament may have softened, but racism was on the rise.
In the leadup to the 1924 election Hertzog proposed a “New Deal” that would put coloureds on a par — economically, at least — with whites. He won the election thanks in part to this trickery. But once in power, he backtracked on most of his promises.
In 1927 a bill which would have given the vote to white women looked sure to pass but Hertzog intervened to stop it. With a general election due soon, he argued, the timing wasn’t right. Instead, he promised to introduce a bill which would extend the vote to white and coloured women if he was reelected in 1929.
This promise was made when Hertzog valued the coloured vote. And — as coloured men had done in 1924 — at least some coloured women swallowed his lies hook, line and sinker. They even baked a tartlet in his honour. The hertzoggie, a delicately spiced biscuit cup filled with apricot jam and desiccated coconut.
Hertzog won the election easily, but he renegued on his promise to coloured women by only enfranchising white women. Hertzog reasoned, writes Gavin Lewis, “that because the opposition had refused to pass the coloured person’s rights bill which defined ‘coloured’ and ‘native’, he could not give coloured women the vote ‘without opening the door to native women’. In any case, unlike white women, not all coloured women were ‘civilised’, Hertzog claimed, and so they could not all qualify.”
His real reasons were far simpler. In 1924 he’d campaigned shamelessly for the coloured vote because he knew it would help him win a tight election. But by 1929, thanks to the overwhelming success of his “swart gevaar” messaging among white voters, he found himself on much surer electoral ground. Instead of worrying about the coloured vote he could focus on doubling the white vote.
This is exactly what he did with the Women’s Enfranchisement Act. By granting a union-wide unqualified franchise to white women over the age of 21, Hertzog reduced “the coloured vote from 12.3% of the electorate to 6.3% overnight”. The smaller black vote was also effectively halved.
When the bad news filtered through, coloured women again took to their ovens, creating a second version of the hertzoggie that replaced apricot jam with garish brown and pink icing. This new biscuit was called the tweegevrietjie — or “two-faced cake”.
At a Cape Town City Hall meeting on April 27 1931, Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, the first “non-European” to serve on the Cape Town city council, and his trailblazing daughter Cissie Gool gave withering assessments of the act. “One of the most recent actions of this Nationalist parliament,” stated Abdurahman, “is to say by virtue of the Women’s Suffrage Act that the Virgin Mary, an Asiatic, may not have a vote. That is a doubly blasphemous thing to do ... the Rev DF Malan ... has forced through parliament an act which lays down that the Mother of Christ shall not have a seat in parliament.”
“In the face of so much oppression it is hard to keep one’s temper,” said Gool, before concluding with a flourish: “A civilised people is being ruled by an ignorant oligarchy.” At the end of the meeting she led a march to parliament and demanded, in vain, to speak to Hertzog.
Some liberal whites objected too. Emily Solomon, a prominent campaigner for women’s rights, refused to use her vote because black and coloured women had not been enfranchised. And Olive Schreiner’s husband demanded that his late wife’s name not be referenced in the suffragettes’ celebrations.
As we know, women of colour would have to wait another 64 years to vote in SA, by which time both hertzoggies and tweegevrietjies had become firm favourites at Cape weddings, birthdays and funerals. The Wembley Bakery in Athlone still sells about 1,500 classic hertzoggies and 800 tweegevrietjies every week.