Writing of(f) the women of the National Women’s Monument

Abstract

The rise of nationalisms throughout the twentieth century presents a constellation of discourses in which the notion of “woman” has undergone phases of mobilisation and dismissal depending on the stage of national consciousness reached. The brochures of the National Women’s Monument, written to augment the reasons for the monument’s erection, reveal the problematics of Afrikaner nationalism and gender. In this paper, tentative parallels are drawn between Afrikaner nationalism and the new emergent African nationalism in South Africa in which the issues of women and nationalism are considered to be products of the same discourse despite increasing rights accruing to women generally.