Letters home : the experiences and perceptions of middle class British women at the Cape 1820-1850
type: CreativeWork
description: My thesis is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of British women living in the Cape Colony, South Africa, during the first half of the nineteenth century. My chief source materials are the letters and diaries written by different women in the period 1820-1850. The women in my thesis were members of the British middle class and proponents of its dominant ideology. This revolved around a "separation of spheres" which prescribed particular types of behaviour for men and women. This view was more of an ideal than a reality, and women in this period found ways in which to both resist and enforce its prescriptions. I am interested in the negotiation of identity that occurred when British women arrived at the Cape. In order to tap into their experiences, I examine in detail the writing of several women who lived in Cape Town, and then compare this to women's writing in different parts of the colony. What emerges is a version of South African history in which the experiences of individual women challenge assumptions about the existence of middle class and colonial homogenising discourses. Women in Cape Town, on the eastern frontier and on mission stations lived in different circumstances. The contexts in which they wrote affected the versions of themselves that they revealed in their writing. The different ways in which they wrote, and they ways in which they constructed a d represented their identities, challenge attempts to fit them into the contemporary feminine mould. While they were creating their own identifies through the medium of letters, they were also creating cultural artefacts. Their letters formed the basis of a private literate culture which both represented these women and their particular view of the Cape to the rest of the world. Women controlled what was written in their letters - their self-representations were presented to their readers in a version not mediated through their male relatives. In their own letters, they were not men's wives, t…
abstract: My thesis is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of British women living in the Cape Colony, South Africa, during the first half of the nineteenth century. My chief source materials are the letters and diaries written by different women in the period 1820-1850. The women in my thesis were members of the British middle class and proponents of its dominant ideology. This revolved around a "separation of spheres" which prescribed particular types of behaviour for men and women. This view was more of an ideal than a reality, and women in this period found ways in which to both resist and enforce its prescriptions. I am interested in the negotiation of identity that occurred when British women arrived at the Cape. In order to tap into their experiences, I examine in detail the writing of several women who lived in Cape Town, and then compare this to women's writing in different parts of the colony. What emerges is a version of South African history in which the experiences of individual women challenge assumptions about the existence of middle class and colonial homogenising discourses. Women in Cape Town, on the eastern frontier and on mission stations lived in different circumstances. The contexts in which they wrote affected the versions of themselves that they revealed in their writing. The different ways in which they wrote, and they ways in which they constructed a d represented their identities, challenge attempts to fit them into the contemporary feminine mould. While they were creating their own identifies through the medium of letters, they were also creating cultural artefacts. Their letters formed the basis of a private literate culture which both represented these women and their particular view of the Cape to the rest of the world. Women controlled what was written in their letters - their self-representations were presented to their readers in a version not mediated through their male relatives. In their own letters, they were not men's wives, t…
author: Erlank, Natasha
language: eng
date published: 1995
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:07Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Historical Studies

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22399