In ‘The Rise and Fall of Afrikaner Women’ (2003), Gilliomee argues that
Afrikaner women’s history ‘is the biggest untold story of the Afrikaner
people’, and in doing so ignores the research on Afrikaner women’s history.
This ignoring of women’s history may be attributed either to orthodoxy in
historical writing or the lack of a review on women’s history despite a
relatively large body of work, focussing in particular on Afrikaner women.
Although contributions to women’s history come out of a wide range of
disciplines, including literary theory, political science, anthropology and
history proper, it is my contention that there is a definable trend developing
in South African historiography which particularly represents the history of
Afrikaner women. This article explicitly shows that the history of Afrikaner
women is not untold through a review of the contributions of scholars
whose work form part of (what I call) the historiography of Afrikaner women.
This article not only contextualises Afrikaner women’s history against the
backdrop of tendencies in historical writing but also focuses on the major
themes in the historiography of Afrikaner women, including identity, political
agency, labour, welfare, class, reproduction and particularly the ongoing
debate of the ‘volksmoeder’http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rshj20/currenthttp://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rshj20/currentDOI:10.1080/02582473.2013.77006