Negotiating femininity, ethnicity and history : representations of Ruth First in South African struggle narratives
An exploration of South African historiography through the prism of representations of activist writer Ruth First (1925-1982) forms the focus of this thesis. Ignored in South African canonical histories during the apartheid era, Ruth First is frequently portrayed as an icon of the struggle in current accounts about the past. The dissertation is ordered by five central discussions: gender, political activism, Jewishness, maternal behaviour and the role of the individual in the community. With reference to her non-fiction writing, autobiographical accounts by her daughters and her contemporaries, photographic exhibitions and transcriptions of amnesty hearings to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (amongst other works), I trace Ruth First's presentation of identity through communications of dress, posture and language. I examine too the production of her image across time in South African culture. Imprisoned under the infamous Ninety-Day law in 1963, Ruth First subsequently wrote a memoir titled 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under South African Ninety-Day Detention Law (1965), which became known as a classic of the genre. Caught between her commitments to racial equality and a life of social privilege, between the demands of motherhood and her sociological research work in Africa, between performances of a white femininity and the suppressed ramifications of a difficult ethnic past, Ruth First shuttles between unsatisfactory subject positions. I propose here that Ruth First strains against the representative mantle which she is made to wear in post-apartheid tributes to the past, and which she herself sometimes donned as a lifetime member of the South African Communist Party, and later the African National Congress. As the daughter of poor Yiddish-speaking Jews from Lithuania, I propose that Ruth First is marked by a history of dislocation, immigration and revolutionary activity which she refused to acknowledge. I undertake my own historiographical exercise through which I re-situate Ruth First within an alternate heritage of Jewish activist women. An understanding of the historiographical process as a series of continuous adjustments of the past to politicized positions in the present underlies my examination. Includes bibliographical references (p. 308-326).
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Department of English Language and Literature