Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Women’s right to vote won through persistence
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles.
MANY, perhaps even most, men in 1930 may have had to steel themselves to vault the mental hurdle of suspicion that when all was said and done, women weren’t really equipped, temperamentally, to participate rationally in politics.
Some were even foolish enough to voice their scepticism.
Yet, two years after Britain’s Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave women suffrage equal to men – not to mention the indisputable contribution of women in every sphere from aviation to medicine, never mind centuries of statecraft – could there have been any sensible resistance to South Africa’s women getting the vote?
As the Cape Argus put it: “Like electricity, internal combustion engines and a host of other dangerous new discoveries, woman suffrage has come to stay, whether we like it or not.”
Even so, in a considered editorial, the paper described the South African women’s suffrage law as “a bad bill”. And the reason was plain enough; Prime Minister J B M Hertzog’s Women’s Enfranchisement Bill of April 1930 was only for white women. The appearance of egalitarianism was contaminated by cynicism.
South Africa’s suffrage movement required no disabusing, one of the headlines of April 12, 1930 – “Half a loaf better than no bread” – reflecting its awareness of the deficiency.
An unnamed founder of the Women’s Enfranchisement League of the Cape, the earliest women’s suffrage organisation of the Union, commented: “Half a loaf is better than no bread, and, though the Bill which has just passed through the House gives us the vote – not as we have always asked for it, on the same terms as it is, or may be, granted to men – still we must be thankful for small mercies and make up our minds to use our political power to bring about a more even level of justice.”
She added: “Though I have steadily stood fast to the principle of equal rights for all, I am glad of justice by instalments if I cannot get the full measure doled out at once.”
Someone described by the newspaper as “a thoughtful professional woman”, commented: “Of course I am glad to have the vote on any terms, but I cannot say that I like the measure which confers it on us. To me it is most unjust to include all women because they are white, and to exclude all others. There are in this country very many very poor and ignorant white women living at a very low grade of civilization, and I cannot think it is fair to put political power into their hands and to withhold it from as many intelligent, keen and progressive coloured women.
“To my mind the Bill, although I welcome it, has been prompted by two wishes: first, to entrench the Nationalist Party by the enfranchisement of ignorant white women; and, secondly, to secure the overwhelming superiority of the white voter over the coloured by according the vote to the white woman, and consequently, in time, to the white man, without qualifications, leaving the door open to the imposition of a high educational barrier on future coloured voters.”
In its “A Bad Bill” editorial on the same day, the Cape Argus noted that “from the outset, convinced opponents of woman suffrage were in a hopeless minority”.
It went on: “But the question whether this particular Bill should have been allowed to go through stands on a very different footing. By the consent of nearly all Cape Province members who respect their traditions, it is a thoroughly objectionable Bill. We need not explain again that by an unpleasant political manoeuvre the Prime Minister has used the cause of woman’s suffrage … as an instrument in his campaign against the historic right of coloured people and natives in the Cape to gain admission to the register subject to a qualification. Adult European suffrage for women inevitably spells death to the coloured and native franchise.”
Was the push for women’s votes all that urgent, after all, since it was “bound to come”?
“The voting has shown conclusively that nothing can stop it. If the position were that yesterday’s opportunity was the last that could be expected for many years, the argument would have force. But that is not the position; and to our mind members who felt that, much as they desired woman suffrage, they could not conscientiously vote success to the Prime Minister’s manoeuvre, cannot be blamed for voting against the measure.”
If, as things turned out, white women had a 64-year advantage – if advantage was what it was – the solidarity of women was a significant rallying point throughout the 20th century, not least in the Black Sash movement, and in the Women’s March of 1956.