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From the book: Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 edited by Cherryl Walker
Between 1926 and 1934 waves of 'insubordination', 'defiance' and 'riots' surged through a girls' reformatory that was located first at Estcourt and then moved to Eshowe, both in Natal (TA, UED, a, b).1 In September 1926 the Sub-Inspector of Police reported to the magistrate of Estcourt: 'On Sunday night the 12th inst. damage to the doors, windows and partitions of dormitories was done to the extent of many pounds and these dormitories are now totally unsafe to house the crowd. The European staff are in bodily fear and the position is such that I have arranged for a police guard to protect the officers and government property' (TA, UED, a).
Six ringleaders in this attack were identified, briefly imprisoned and later, on continuing to be refractory, transferred to Pietermaritzburg gaol. The reformatory itself was moved to Eshowe and housed in a building adjoining an adult male prison. These efforts did not, however, still the girls' rebelliousness. In March 1928 four girls ranging in age from 14 to 20 were reported to the Director of Prisons for making attempts to persuade [others] to disobey orders, to commit acts of violence and to destroy reformatory property' (ibid.). The day after the magistrate sentenced them; they proceeded to smash the doors, windows and furniture in their cells. More staff was appointed and discipline was tightened. Two years later, in October 1931, the 'non-European inmates, resenting the punishments inflicted upon them for misconduct' again 'assumed an aggressive and defiant attitude and endeavoured to create a disturbance among all inmates and to carry out assaults on members of staff (TA, UED, b). In 1933 another 'wave of insubordination' racked the reformatory. Throughout the year there were attempted assaults on staff as well as hunger strikes and refusals to work (ibid.).
Two issues relating to these incidents are remarkable. The first is the way in which the girls' behaviour conforms to a general pattern girls and women in twentieth-century prisons have been 'rowdier and more disorderly than young adolescent boys' (O'Brien, 1982: 141), or, put another way, 'although there was only a small minority of delinquent girls [in British reformatories between 1889 and 1939, as in South African], they were much more fiercely resistant character reformation than delinquent boys' (Humphries, 1981:237). The level of violence amongst these girls contradicted the societal females as normally passive.
The official reasons the South African authorities gave for this violence were that delinquent girls were feebleminded and thus prone to irrational, violent behaviour; that the absence of a punishment and reward structure in the reformatory encouraged collective resistance; and that the mental derangement which underlay violence also had its source in masturbation and lesbianism (TA, UED, a). The solutions they proposed involved testing by a 'mental expert’ before admission to the reformatory, greater classification and segregation of girls, transferral of unsuitable or incorrigible girls to prisons or mental institutions, and the introduction of a properly graded punishment and reward structure.
The roots of these revolts are not the concern of this chapter sufficient evidence for the specific grievances involved in each revolt is not available. What can be said with some certainty, however is that the official construction of events reveals more about the assumptions and presuppositions underlying the approach taken to female crime and deviance in early-twentieth-century South Africa than about the causes of delinquent behaviour. The official reasons and solutions are thus notable not so much for their accuracy as for the correlation by the authorities between female defiance and deviance between expressions of sexuality in young girls and mental. The process whereby criminalised black and white girls were constituted as both abnormal and defective forms part of the cones this chapter.
Also noteworthy about the events recorded here is the institution in which the rioting occurred, an institution that, both in its structure and in the relationships between the girls resident in it, does not seem to have conformed to the more general ordering of South African society. The Estcourt (later Eshowe) reformatory was part of national system of reformatories built after Union in 1910 and organized by colour, age and sex. By 1933 there were five reformatories and the single reformatory at Eshowe for girls. The boys' reformatories were segregated according to colour and age. How girls' reformatory, by contrast, included girls of all ages and segregated, although African girls were in the majority. Yet it was anomalous in this respect, it also formed part of a wider system control for 'wayward' teenage girls that were indeed racially segregated.
Complementing the reformatory system was a system of industrial schools which had been established from 1909 onwards to 'rescue' the offspring of the white unemployed from indigence.2 Two of these schools, one for boys at Heidelberg (Transvaal) and one for girls at Standerton, were specifically designed for youth in danger of falling into crime or prostitution or both, either through poverty or as a result of parental neglect. Despite its official designation as an industrial school, Standerton was, to all intents and purposes, a reformatory for white girls drawn mainly from the white manual working class. Whereas the reformatory was created for the rehabilitation of convicted juvenile offenders, the industrial school was intended for the 'protection of destitute [white] children and waifs and strays' (Children's Protection Act, 1913).
Within this dual system, the disciplinary regime of 'protection' and rehabilitation' as applied to the girls was informed by an ideology of femininity and domesticity common to both institutions. This ideology was mediated by a specific understanding of deviance, which flit across the lives of both black and white girls, affecting them differently. Thus an examination of the different social and ideological processes by which the girls were criminalised and institutionalised, the distinct futures for which they were prepared, as well as their responses to their situation, will help to cast light on the interaction of class, colour and gender in South Africa. This chapter will argue furthermore that social definitions of female deviance helped to shape 'normal' social and sexual relations in South Africa under segregation.
The institutions themselves, comprising one of the most hidden dimensions of the penal-educational nexus, made invisible a group of girls already marginalized by their sex and their class, even as they stigmatized and branded them on their return to society. It is important to note, however, that in taking the reformatory and industrial school as a case-study, I am focusing not on an 'abnormal' section of society but on what Michelle Perrot has called 'an exogamic aspect of ourselves, a broken mirror that reflects our image at the outer limits of experience ... where we can read a culture differently but as clearly as in the accumulated mass of events' (1978: 213).
REHABILITATION: GENERAL THEORY AND POLICY
The immediate context for the expansion of the industrial and reformatory system was the development of an industrial social and economic order within South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New classes and social forces emerged at this to the one hand there had arisen a modernising indigenous 'lass, allied to British imperialism, that was intent on transforming social relations and creating a modern state with appropriate social institutions. On the other hand the process of primitive accumulation which this entailed had also created a new black and white proletariat. Within the white working class in particular a cleavage developed between the employed and the unemployed, what Victorian commentators would have referred to as the 'respectable' and the ‘rough’. In South Africa this unemployed 'residuum' was discursively fixed, along with its rural counterpart, as the 'poor white'. It stood on the margins of the system of production: this marginality carried with it the menace of the unpredictable and the unattached. The destitution of this class was also its potential danger. In the network of slums that grew up around Johannesburg and other cities, this class was thrown together with dispossessed blacks. A culture cutting across colour lines and marked by the criminality of the illicit liquor-seller emerged. As the number of poor whites increased nationally from an already high figure of 120 000 in 1922 to 300 000 by 1932, they became a matter of great concern to the dominant group: the potential effect on the dominated African people was African people considered to be catalytic (Davies, 1979). The response of South Africa's ruling class to this and other problems of industrialization was the development of a segregationist policy (Marks and Trapido 1987). A two-pronged strategy was adopted by the state towards the children of the white working class.
Firstly, their incorporation into the established order was sought through free and compulsory schooling on segregated school benches. Secondly, the problem of the children of the rural and urban white poor and unemployed was addressed through industrial schools and reformatories, where they were to be trained and re-allocated to manual labouring and supervisory positions within the social and racial division of labour.
This segregationist policy was legitimated by Social Darwinism and scientific racism’, and informed the official conception of delinquency that developed in the early twentieth century. Two contrasting, although sometimes overlapping, approaches to juvenile crime unfolded during the first two formative decades of this century. The notion of rehabilitation was central to both. The one-century approach was represented by civil servants such as Jacob de Villiers Roos, Director of Prisons between 1908 and 1918 and architect of South Africa's criminal and juvenile policy after Union. For Roos, the threat and potential burden of crime to the state could be reduced first of all by empirically and scientifically demarcating and classifying the criminal population, and secondly by isolating different sections of this population in an institutional environment, such as a prison reformatory or industrial school.
The classification and segregation of prisoners according and race were fundamental to this notion of regeneration and rehabilitation. In the prison or reformatory, it was believed; the criminal could be converted, reformed and made useful. The prison or reformatory comprised 'one great reforming school' where the offender could be rehabilitated through work, religion and discipline Roos, 1911: passim). Since criminality was viewed as a 'sort of moral illness', rehabilitation strategies were aimed at the 'moral reform' of the individual. In this way the individual could be reclaimed and public harmony and stability secured (Chisholm, 1988).
The rehabilitation of youth was integral to this approach. Its centrality was captured in the aphorism frequently repeated at this time:
'Save the child and prevent the criminal.' The industrial school would rescue children in danger of falling into crime and thereby becoming a burden to the state, by teaching them a trade and the 'habits of industry'. The reformatory would reclaim the 'fallen' juvenile offender by similar methods. This notion of rehabilitation was clearly founded on the belief that individuals could be saved through exposure to an environment away from the corrupting effects of modem city life. The second approach to juvenile crime current in the early twentieth century was that held by a new generation of social workers, exemplified by the Christian socialist H. E. Norman, South Africa's first probation officer, who was appointed by Roos in 1916.3 It was shared by welfare organisations such as the Children's Aid Society in Johannesburg, founded in 1908. Their welfare schemes differed from those the philanthropists and missionaries of the early days of industrialisation in their emphasis on prevention rather than palliatives, education rather than charity and relief (Krut, 1983:9). Although middle-class women dominated the welfare movement in South Africa, its key ideologist was Norman, who stressed the importance of rehabilitation, not in an institutional setting but in the community and family from which the offender sprang. The patriarchal family home provided the model for his rehabilitation strategies, which were at once an extension and a critique of the institutional model offered by men like De Villiers Roos. These reformers also advocated rehabilitation of the juvenile offender in an institutional setting, characterized by patriarchal relations, provided that probation work, aimed at reconstituting family life in civil society, was also involved.
Although penal and welfare ideologists differed over the meaning and content of rehabilitation, they shared a commitment to restoring social unity through the reclamation of juvenile offenders. Whereas the one sought to regulate social conflict through incarceration, the other sought to do so in civil society. Very early on, however, the contradiction between the repressive nature of reformatories and industrial schools and the expressed goal of humanitarian reform and rehabilitation was revealed. There was a public scandal in 1911 over reports of the prison-like atmosphere at the state institutions; inmates attempted to escape from them with disturbing regularity, and rates of recidivism remained high. All this seemed to testify against the reformative value of institutions. Nonetheless, they, and the goal rehabilitation, remained fixed.
At this point we need to take a closer look at the concept of 'rehabilitation'. Three perspectives are relevant here, each of which informs, in different ways, the analysis that will follow. In the first place, there is the view that rehabilitation can be understood, as David Williams has argued, in terms of the way in which 'ideology mystifies the social realities of capitalist exploitation' (Williams, 1982:34), Prisons, like reformatories and industrial schools, are only justified, he argues, by the ideological perspective which asserts that their aim is to reform offenders. This is part and parcel of a broad consensus perspective which denies any divisions or conflict in society: The assumption promoted ... is that society is essentially free from socio-economic divisions and crimes and that these must therefore be committed by people who are maladjusted deviants. Thus the consensus view of society leads to the conclusion that the maladjusted ought to be readjusted, i.e. reformed' (Williams, 1982:34). The concept of rehabilitation in the consensus view thus displaces the blame to crime from particular forms of social relations to individual pathology. It justifies continued repression of the consequences of inequality.
Another view is presented by Michel Foucault (1977), that reform girls of the prison, and its discourse, are as old as the prison itself. This should be understood in terms of the role of the prison not in eliminating - crime but, rather, of producing an autonomous sub-class of as we delinquents or habitual offenders, drawn largely from, but no longer belonging to, the working class. The creation of this sub-class””draws a symbolic line, a boundary, between deviant and non-deviant. Its value for Foucault seems to be, above all, symbolic. The production of illegalities or delinquencies is achieved through specific mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and through the objectification involved in the processes of categorising, classifying, and institutionally segregating. The delinquent is thus 'placed in full light' and produced as pathologised subject. Simultaneously, those elements that are classically designated as part of a programme of reform - education and productive work - are, in Foucault's schema, part of the means by which the 'microphysics of power' productive of 'docile goes to work. In this sense, the practices of rehabilitation must taken at face value as constituting a new, more progress humane system of punishment: it forms a more finely calibrated means for both creating the disciplined body, the subjected individual, and for 'objectifying the delinquency behind the offence' (Foucault, 1977:135-70, 257-93).
A further way of conceptualizing rehabilitation is that which sees it as a means of defining social relations within the institution – as providing and creating the plan for all activities within it, the context within which institutional life takes place and the meaning given to the daily schedule (O'Brien, 1982). What happens inside these institutions, however, rarely corresponds to specific models or programmes. Institutional realities are shaped by the contextual, social reality of which they are a part, and with which they interact, and by the patterns of wider social relations brought into the institutions by the inmates. These help to shape and redefine the rehabilitative model within the institution. Thus the concept of rehabilitation should be understood contextually. The reality of rehabilitation is given its meaning through the institutional set of relationships defined by different models of rehabilitation, the social realities within which the institution is situated and which traverse its operations, as well as the wider set of social relations brought into the institution by its occupants.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE DEVIANCE
The notion of female deviance developed in South Africa was shaped by an interrelated set of ideas about crime and mental defect. These ideas were generally applicable to girls, but also had a more specific racial component which was differentially applied to black and white girls. Its advocates were drawn from a new professional class in South African society. In the first two decades of the century the growing involvement of the welfare movement amongst urban 'poor whites', swell as the reorganization of the education system for whites in general, brought in their wake a phalanx of educationists, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. Initially drawing on the same repertoire of ideas as Norman, they became increasingly receptive in the 1920s to the work on juvenile delinquency of psychologists " Healey in the United States and Cyril Burt in England. This approach readily segregated environmental from innate factors in the aetiology of Juvenile crime. Whereas Norman and his co-workers tended to stress poverty as the major cause of delinquency, now, increasingly, psychology or intelligence was stressed, with delinquency being linked to behavioural traits and low intelligence. This shift had distinct implications for the content of rehabilitation strategies in South Africa.
By the beginning of the 1920s there was some overlap in penal and welfare-educational ideology. This was particularly evident in the official concern with the relative intelligence of black and white youth. It was an issue closely bound up with providing biological justifications for classifying inmates in the reformatories segregating the races in the wider society. A virtual mania for testing and classification developed. Racist stereotypes were given a new, supposedly scientific legitimacy. C. T. Loram, Chief Inspector of Natal Education in Natal, tested African children and 'discovered' that mental development was 'arrested' at adolescence (Loram, 1917 and 1927). Dr M. L. Pick, who studied at Harvard University and became an educational psychologist with the National Bureau of Education and Social Research (predecessor of the Human Sciences Research Council), conferred further authority on these views by his tests, the results of which were published in 1939 in his book The Educability of the South African Native (see Cross, 1986; Dubow, 1987).
Pick's primary concern during the 1920s and the Depression years of the early 1930s, however, was mental deficiency amongst South Africa's poor and unemployed white population. This was the time when the 'poor white problem' was at the forefront of social and political thought. Reformatories and industrial schools provided an excellent laboratory for Pick's work and, accordingly, he and other doctors and psychiatrists conducted extensive tests in these institutions. The results were, not surprisingly, used to prove the connection between juvenile delinquency and mental abnormality (Moll, 1923).
Both classist and racist assumptions about the mental inferiority of blacks and poor whites, and the superiority of whites in general an of the middle classes in particular, underpinned the connection made between delinquency and mental deficiency. In the discourse of the scientific racism', black juveniles were defined as backward because they belonged to an inferior race; black delinquency was, therefore an expected rather than an abnormal state of affairs. On the other hand delinquency amongst whites, and in particular those seen; as 'poor whites', was a sign of racial degeneration amongst the civilised races, a product of the uncontrolled development of a black and white proletariat thrown together in the cities (Dubow, 1987). Nor mental backwardness among 'poor whites' was not as irretrievable phenomenon as among black youth. Many argued that the causes of white delinquency were different from those for black, thus guaranteeing at least the possibility of white educability and social mobility.
In 1928 Louis van Schalkwyk, Inspector of Industrial Schools for the Union Education Department, conceded that the 'great problem with which industrial schools have to cope is backwardness or mental retardation'. However, the cause of this backwardness, he argued, lay not in 'inferior mental abilities' but in an 'absence of parental responsibilities' and in 'psychopathic tendencies, that is tendencies towards conduct, character or personality difficulties' (TA, UED, b). In the case of both black and white youth, delinquency provided evidence of backwardness, but whereas defective home conditions, nonconformity and intractability were more often invoked as explanations in the case of white delinquents, in the case of black delinquents their supposed backwardness was explained on biological or cultural grounds. Degeneracy among whites was construed largely as a social phenomenon, a result of the corrupting effects of their environment. Degeneracy among blacks, by contrast, was construed as part of their biological constitution.
The Eshowe and Standerton institutions for girls developed within this general framework of thought about deviance. In addition, however, delinquency and mental deficiency amongst girls in particular were related to their gender and their sexuality. Young girls who were seen to be sexually active as well as rebellious were likely to be considered abnormal and deviant. The view expressed by Dr Moll, that 'the incidence of mental defect amongst sexually delinquent females [is] nearly always much higher than in any other group of wrongdoers' (Moll, 1923; see also Roos, c. 1920), was not an uncommon one. Here he was referring to the image of the white proletarian child, the potential prostitute, already congenitally disposed to degeneracy. These perceptions were reflected in the official reasons for the volts at Eshowe, cited earlier. They embodied classic nineteenth-century stereotypes, translated into a colonial context. The distance of the white female deviant from the 'normal' woman was represented by her implied pathological predisposition to sexual delinquency, as well as by her feeblemindedness.
Any sexual flouting of the racial code reinforced the association of lower-class girls and women with degeneracy. As Gilman has pointed out, the term 'miscegenation', dating from the late nineteenth century and still in use at this time, embodied a fear not merely of interracial sexuality, but also of its supposed result, the decline of the white population. If such liaisons produced any children at all, these would be weak and doomed, threatening the white race with deterioration and ultimate defeat in the struggle for survival (Gilman, 1985: 107). On white women and girls, then, depended the survival of the race ‘pure’.
The black woman or young girl stood at the opposite end of the scale of civilisation, of order and control. In late-nineteenth-century thought she was, as Gilman has shown, the source of corruption and disease, her sexuality an icon for black sexuality in general, black sexuality in turn being an icon for deviant sexuality as a whole. This representation of black female sexuality had a strong South African component. The 'Hottentot' woman, for example, during the nineteenth century became the epitome in European thinking of 'primitive 'sexuality (Gilman, 1985). The black female represented in these terms society out of control.
Herein, perhaps, lies part of the explanation for the lack of a colour bar in the girls' reformatory. Placing white deviant girls in the institution as black thus underlined their common lot as the degrees (degenerates') of humanity in the minds of those shaping their lives. The white girls sent to Eshowe were girls who, through their close association with blacks and through their lack of feminine virtue, had abandoned their allegiance to 'civilisation'. They were the product of that moral decay attendant on race fusion and miscegenation which so obsessed the eugenicist-inspired social engineers of South Africa's racial order. As such, these girls were 'biological degenerates', deserving only of being cast out from white society. The black girls, by contrast, were present in the reformatories as exemplars of social disorder. Both groups represented that which the social engineers of segregation sought to isolate and identify as abnormal. It must be noted, however, that the numbers in the girls' reformatory were not very large. Between 1926 and 1934 an average of 8 white, 1 'Asiatic' and 77 'native and coloured' girls were sent to the reformatory per year (Prisons Department, Annual Reports 1926-1934).
In the segregated industrial school such girls could conceivably have contaminated those in whom the process of demoralization was but embryonic. Standerton was established for white girls who had not crossed the boundary separating white from black, but who had living in circumstances or were developing habits which might help break down these social barriers. They could still be rescued and saved from this fate by removing them from an environment of vice and immorality to one of discipline and control.
These ideologies had material effects on the lives of the inmates of the institutions. Since their sexual deviance was held responsible for their aggression, they were punished for it with an equivalent psychological violence. If, as at Estcourt (later Eshowe), where the girls were already defined as deviant, their aggression and resistance to control appeared overdeveloped and could not be corrected by punishment, then they could be considered incorrigible, and so illegible for gaol, or certifiably insane. In 1930 a 15-year-old girl was sent for examination to a psychiatrist because she was ‘very temperamental and quarrelsome [and] subject to violent outbursts of temper which were followed by prolonged fits of hysterical weeping' (TA, UED, c). In this case the medical officer found her to be sane and she was returned to her home. Others were not so lucky. Sophie K was transferred to a mental hospital in the same year, having caused 'considerable trouble and anxiety'. She had 'made no effort... to reform herself. Her industry [was] very unsatisfactory. She [had] been the cause of many disturbances among the inmates. [She was] immoral in her conduct, very untruthful and dishonest' (ibid.). It was in this year, too, that the Board of Visitors of the reformatory recommended that the girls be examined by a psychiatrist every quarter (TA, UED, d).
During 1933 and 1934, when the reformatory was racked by revolt, several girls were certified insane. One of these was Maria K, who had 'always been a most difficult case and [had] violent attacks of uncontrollable rage f which] were a danger to others' (TA, UED, a). Selina M was certified twice for being 'subject to periodical fits of violence and committing assaults on others' (TA, UED, e).
Regular mental testing provided the proof of abnormality at Standerton. Here Dr Fick undertook testing with the clear intention of segregating and subjecting to sterner discipline those girls found to be 'feeble-minded' or 'sub-normal' (TA, UED, f). The more backward' a girl was, the more it was assumed she required strict discipline. Backwardness and abnormality were frequently linked to conduct, especially that regarded as defiant (TA, UED, f). After regular testing, the degree of sub-normality at Standerton was found to be high, and in July 1932 a special class was started, which subsequently grew into a separate school. Die Vlakteskool. The purpose of this legation was to prepare 'sub-normal' girls for their expected restricted futures. While the prospective employment of a 'normal' delinquent was domestic service, sub-normal girls were not considered fit for this. The only avenue of employment for these misfits', Fick intoned, 'appears to be work of a routine type in a factory with proper supervision in a hostel after working hours' (TA, UED, g).
Although special provision had thus been made for 'mentally sub-normal' girls, a need was still felt for a special institution that would cater for Standerton girls regarded as 'difficult' (Marks, 1987). Both the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church and George Hofmeyr, Secretary of the Union Education Department, took a special interest in establishing such an institution. Accordingly, in 1932 the Luckhoff Institute was opened in Durbanvillle, near Cape Town, to house about 40 girls defined as psychopathic. It was later renamed the Durbanville Institute for Girls. This Institute took in white girls only and resembled Eshowe in not including any instruction beyond drudgery in its programme.
The concept of female delinquency that gained currency during the first three decades of the century drew on and adapted wider ideologies of racial and sexual inferiority. It acted as a powerful legitimating tool for the isolation and differential treatment of a sector of working-class society seen as increasingly ‘abnormal’ in the eyes of a segregationist state in the making.
REASONS FOR COMMITTAL: CLASS, GENDER AND RACE
The grounds on which girls were referred to the industrial school or to the reformatory underscore the argument that they represented a section of a segregated society 'out of control'. The legislative underpinnings of the industrial school-reformatory system were provided by two pieces of legislation. The Children's Protection Act of 1913 which was largely the work of the Children's Aid Society, provided several grounds on which white children could be removed to industrial trial schools, while the Prisons and Reformatories Act of 1911 specified conviction of a criminal offence as a precondition for commit to a reformatory (CAS, 1913). In the case of the industrial schools white children under the age of 16 could be committed if their parents were found to have no fixed home, had been charged with a criminal offence or were living in circumstances likely to favour the 'corruption or seduction' of their charges. In addition to the grounds of destitution or neglect, children could also be sent to an industrial school for 'uncontrollability', such as playing truant from school or being engaged in begging or street trading. Almost without exception, it was poor or working-class children who were targeted by these criteria. The industrial school system also provided the state with a useful alternative to government schools for children from orphanages, and frequently orphaned children were automatically transferred to these schools upon reaching the age of 12. Magistrates, social workers and school boards were authorised to refer children to industrial schools.
There is evidence, however, that parents themselves often committed their children as well (CAS, 1909: letter to Rose Innes). The Children's Aid Society complained again and again that 'it would appear that the parents thought that the industrial school would be an easy way to get rid of their children' (CAS, 1909: letter to Rose Innes). At their congress in Johannesburg in 1912, the Zuid Afrikaansche Vrouwen Federatie called for penalties to be imposed on parents 'who were only too pleased to get rid of their charges' (CAS, 1913; Van Krieken, 1987). Often these parents had been forced to resort to this step because of their poverty. Thus Eleanor Shipley, herself a pupil at Standerton in 1926 and 1927, later committed her daughter to'' industrial school, partly as punishment for the girl's 'cheek' partly so that she could learn home-making skills. Abandoned by husband, working long hours in a clothing factory and burdened with the care of five children, Shipley saw the industrial school as an option that would free her from her double burden as both a domestic and a wage worker (CAS, 1909; Knit, 1983; Eleanor Shipley interview).
Undoubtedly many real cases of child abuse, neglect and incest came before the welfare community, and many of the girls who were institutionalised were very real victims of their home and living situations (see CAS, Minutes 1914; Krut, 1983). Nonetheless, the decision to institutionalise a girl often involved an official construction of her situation that reduced it to a question of morality and her' conformity to the stereotypes of appropriate feminine behaviour. TheChildren’s Aid Society had the power to remove children from 'immoral or 'unfit environments'. 'Immorality' when applied to parents usually meant that they were involved either in illicit liquor dealing or in racially mixed relationships (Krut, 1983: 27).
In the case of girls, immorality was also linked to their sexual behaviour. This is illustrated in the case of May and Winifred S (15 and 13 years old respectively), who were sent Standerton during 1920 on the grounds that they were destitute. Their parents, while in South Africa, had separated. Their mother had taken them with her gland, where she had placed them in a workhouse. Here they found by a Mrs. G, who had links with the Children's Aid Society the girls' father in Johannesburg. May, then 11, was found covered in sores', 'suffering from a certain disease' and to have had ml relations' with her mother's lover. Mrs. G returned the girls to South Africa but found them 'more than she could manage' and so took them to the Children's Aid Society. What struck the Society was that 'May is most untruthful and disobedient and is not clean in her person and her morals are bad. The same applies to the younger girl Winifred.... The only thing to save them from becoming utterly bad put them in an industrial school where they can be under strict discipline' (CAS, Minutes 1914).
Comparison with the referral history of white boys helps to cast more relight on the sexual construction of female crime. Two sources exist to examine this: the Annual Reports of the Department of Justice and Prisons up to 1918 and a Prisons Department file on 35 cases of children transferred to reformatories from industrial schools during 1932 (file 1/691/30, part 1). The former indicate that by far the majority of white boys committed to reformatory sentences at the Breakwater Reformatory in Cape Town during this period were convicted for illicit liquor-selling. White male youth criminality was mainly determined by their involvement in this trade. The problem amongst girls, however, was construed as one of immorality. In the file on 35 cases transferred to reformatories during 1932, two were girls; both of them classified 'coloured' (ibid.). The boys were all transferred on the grounds of 'destitution' and 'uncontrollability'. In all but one case, in which the boy was considered to be an 'absolute sex maniac', 'uncontrollability' referred to absconding from the industrial school at Heidelberg, theft, or having an 'evil effect' on other toys in the school. In the case of the two girls, 'uncontrollability' had a different connotation. Lucy L's crime (she was 15 years old) was that she had been keeping bad company and [was] immoral having had sexual intercourse with several men'. As a 'coloured' girl she could not be sent to Standerton, so was sent to the reformatory at Eshowe instead. In the case of Nettie S (also 15), 'uncontrollability' also referred to sexual promiscuity: 'The girl was working for Mrs. W. P. Mulder, but on several occasions ran away and had immoral relation- ships with coloured men. She was therefore brought under the provisions of the Children's Protection Act to place her under control and remove her from danger. She should be transferred to reformatory where she can be under strict control and discipline (ibid.). Although these cases form a very small sample, the different interpretations of what constituted uncontrollability among the boys and the girls do illustrate a more general trend,
An analysis of the crimes for which black and white girls were committed to Eshowe shows, further, that the concern with sexuality on assess and morality was most marked with regard to white girls. Between June 1927 and June 1934 there were some 268 girls in the reformatory. The vast majority of African and 'coloured' girls were committed on the grounds of theft, including stock theft, and house-breaking with intent to steal. The second most common reason for committal was poisoning and murder, with a few cases of assault, arson, desertion from employment and trespassing also reported. By contrast, just under half the white girls were sent to the reformatory because of theft. The rest had been institutionalised on various charges relating to 'immorality': prostitution, loitering with intent to solicit, and vagrancy. At a time when 'immorality' was often a euphemism for RELATIONSHIPS across the colour line, interracial sex featured prominently as a reason for committal. A 1931 report of the reformatory stated unambiguously that 'many of the European inmates have been sentenced under the Immorality Act and for co-habitation with natives’ (TA, UED, b).
Thus, whereas white girls were convicted mainly for offences social-sexual nature, black girls and white boys were more often charged for property offences. White girls, furthermore, were criminalised for transgressing not only the rules of socially acceptable feminine behaviour, but also those regulating relations between black and white. Black girls in contrast schools and white. Black girls, in contrast, were criminalised for transgressing class laws and violating property relations in a colonial order. They were punished for crimes that represented a loss of control in society in general, whereas white girls were punished for their betrayal of white society in particular.
THE DISCIPLINARY REGIME OF EDUCATIONAL REHABILITATION
Rehabilitation strategies at Standerton and Estcourt (Eshowe) were factory dominated by conventional notions of what constituted women’s work and by specific structures of control. In this respect the two institutions did not differ from the girls' hostels established by missionary societies for blacks girls in South Africa’s cities, or from the girls’ industrial schools and reformatories in the United States, England and Australia. In all these institutions the curricular emphasis was on vocational training for domestic service, whether in the girls' own homes or in the homes of others (Cock, 1980; Brenzel, 1975,1980;Gaitskell, 1979, 1983; Wimshurst, 1984; Hahn Rafter, 1983). Correctional education for girls was primarily meant to equip them for domestic service or motherhood. There were, however, differences in the way the ideology of domesticity was applied, as well as in the level of sophistication of control found in the two types of institution. In addition, the types of instruction the white girls received depended on assessments of their abilities through mental testing, and initially some were given the opportunity of limited academic work, if they were able to show the aptitude.
Thus some limited attention was paid to non-vocational education at the industrial school at Standerton, once it had been transferred to the Union Education Department in 1917. After 1919 outstanding pupils were sent to the local provincial school. At the industrial school itself, provision was made for schooling up to Standard 6 and for instruction in the National Housewife's Certificate once Standard 6 had been passed. Immediately after the school was transferred to the Union Education Department in 1917, moves were set afoot to ensure to that large number of pupils ... attain a better position in life' and be trained to become teachers (in housecraft schools), typists and 'nurses, but not much came of this initiative.
Apart from this scholastic work, the girls were also instructed in the following trades: laundry, sewing, cooking and upholstery. Courses offered in the boys' industrial school, on the other hand, included carpentry, joinery and cabinet-making, boot-making, tailoring and plumbing. The teacher of the upholstery class at Standerton was a man; in this class, girls made, amongst other things, bookshelves and cupboards, thus learning woodwork, a trade usually found only at tools boys school.
The main emphasis, however, remained on work qualifying girls for domestic service. This was underscored by the appointment of an Inspectress of Domestic Science for the school in 1921, one Miss Chattey, and by the apprenticeship of large numbers of girls as 'home helps during the last years of their training. Their instruction thus provided the majority of girls for gender-specific, unskilled work in Eleanor Shipley, for example, spent the greater part of her life washing clothes for others and working as a seamstress in a factory. She was not unusual in this regard. A study of former pupils, conducted in 1931, showed that '50 per cent of the girls visited were their families and of these 10 per cent were working for other people; the rest helped at home' (Albertyn, 1935: 93).
Before1930 both the academic achievements of the girls in the provincial school as well as the instruction in woodwork were a matter of some pride to the school authorities. The former confirmed a belief in the educability of industrial school girls and in the possibility that they could be rehabilitated. Success justified the existence of the school. In 1929 an industrial school girl gained the highest marks for Form One in both her class and in the district as a whole. Opposing notions about the backwardness of delinquent girls were, however, gaining ground by the late 1920s. Continual testing confirmed beliefs about their ineducability, and determined official perceptions about their future performance. In 1929 the School Inspector's report noted that 'About 70% of the pupils are of the mentally backward (subnormal) type. The quality of the schoolwork is thus of an elementary nature considered to be within the limits of the pupils' intellectual capacity and to make a certain degree of development possible' (TA, UED, f; translated). At this point the academic curriculum was modified: geography was dropped to allow for a greater emphasis on gardening and chicken-farming, and a special class and eventually a separate school. Die Vlakteskool, was started.
This was the time when concern about rescuing poor whites was at its height. Nationally, an inquiry into poverty (amongst whites only) was undertaken by the Carnegie Commission, its results being published in 1932. One of its key participants was the educationist and historian, E. G. Malherbe, who later observed that, because of their association with 'the destitute, the defective and the delinquent, as well as with manual work', which was generally seen to be the province of blacks, a permanent stigma became attached to the industrial schools: Though the Church baptized it and the Prisons Department nursed it for a time, it was begotten in shame. Placed later on the doorstep of the provincial education departments, this foundling was never happy. In fact, it was the Cinderella of the school (1925:165).
If the industrial school was the Cinderella of the school system, reformatory was its Caliban. At Estcourt (Eshowe) there was little, if any, academic instruction and domestic instruction was instructional in name only. Academic education involved gathering girls of all ages into one large room where the pretence was made of schooling them in the three Rs (Mrs. Mpanza, interview). Most of the girls' time was spent in work designed to keep them busy and to supply other penal institutions and industries with various goods (UG36-18).
By 1934 some differentiation in the type of manual work undertaken by black and white girls at the reformatory had occurred. Even though both groups were occupied in unskilled work, the nature of the differentiation is suggestive of a racial hierarchy. For the black girls, 'industrial education' consisted of work done out of doors, in the gaol garden adjoining the reformatory. Here they gardened or beatsisal leaves for the making of mats and baskets (TA, UED, b). The white girls, in contrast, were generally employed inside the institution making and mending inmates' clothing and working in the dry. A revealing point of difference in status between the industrial school and the reformatory is that, whereas at the industrial id black women did the laundry for the white girls, at the reformatory the white girls did the laundry for the institution (including alack girls) as a whole. Thus at the industrial school, the hidden curriculum prepared white girls for a racial division of domestic labour within their future homes. The subtle colour bar operating in the work the girls were given at reformatory was more overt in the living arrangements, as well as in the privileges, limited as they were, that were eventually made available to white girls only. Thus the reformatory dormitories were segregated, while white girls whose conduct merited it were given permission to go on outings. The outings began to occur only after 1926, and took the form of invitations by the Board of Visitors to selected girls to attend Christmas picnics, motor outings, 'bioscope entertainments, lectures, swimming galas, sing-songs at the local school and theatrical 'entertainments' (TA, UED, b).
These discriminatory privileges can be interpreted in a number of different ways. They may have formed part of an attempt to develop a system of rewards and privileges for good conduct that was previously non-existent and strongly recommended after the riots of 1926, in which white girls had been involved. That only the white girls received the special treatment, however, reflects the racial form that charitable concern amongst the authorities took. The privileges may also have been part of an effort to try to heighten the white girls' sense of superiority over the black girls by virtue of their being white. In effect they operated as a form of social inclusion of the white girls and social exclusion of the black.
There certainly grounds for official anxiety about the relative lack of colour consciousness amongst the girls themselves. Although there is evidence of racial insults being exchanged during fights, no doubt exacerbated by the white differential positions occupied by the white and the black girls in the reformatory hierarchy, there is also evidence that and white girls formed strong emotional ties of warmth affection, frequently in active lesbian sexual relationships. Girls formed themselves into 'husband and wife' teams and could become so attached to their partners that if one partner found she was to be toted from the other, she would 'deliberately misbehave, regardless punishment to get back to her...' (TA, UED, a). In these relationships no consideration was given to race. There was, indeed, considerable concern on the part of the authorities that 'European encourages familiar behaviour on the part of non-European inmates towards them' (TA, UED, b). The relative privileges of limited social inclusion for the white girls may well have been a response to the social implications of this sub-culture. Whether it was a deliberate and conscious response or not, the process of discrimination, as well as its effects, expressed in microcosm the response of South Africa's dominant classes to forms of social organisation amongst the underclasses which threatened its racial authority and undermined the structures of control (see Davies, 1979).
The disciplinary regimes of the industrial school and the reformatory, while sharing certain features of 'the total institution' (Goffman, 1961), did evince differences in the way in which the girls were incorporated into the overall system of control. The structure of discipline and control in the reformatory corresponded to that of a prison. The institution, despite its location in verdant Natal, was itself housed in an old prison building after the move to Eshowe. Girls were locked into barred dormitories at night and were guarded by baton-wielding warders by day. Resistance between 1926 and 1934 thus toot the classic form of prison riots. Doors, windows and dormitory partitions were smashed, dinner and work refused, and, at times, members of staff (all, apart from two black wardresses, white) were assaulted (TA, UED, a, b). When this happened in 1926 a police guard was called in, and those identified as the ringleaders were placed in solitary confinement in a small, dark and dank cell under the stairs, on spare diet, until their punishment had been decided upon by the local magistrate, in consultation with the matron.
In the industrial school discipline took a less overtly repressive form. The school was housed in military barracks dating from the Anglo-Boer War. These buildings were divided into 'cottages’, each of which was run by an assistant matron, with the help of one 20 girls assigned to it. This girl was the patrol leader and was responsible for discipline, cleanliness and the tidiness in the cottage- a hard task, given the vermin-infested state of the buildings. The girl under constant, albeit benignly expressed, surveillance – what one writer has referred to as 'affectional discipline' (Schlossman, 1977) By 1930 there were 29 members of staff as against 225-240 girls, giving staff-pupil ratio of one to eight. An emphasis on personal loyalty to staff members was the chief mechanism for maintaining control absconding; insolence and daydreaming were the main forms 'counter-identification' with the institution took (Eleanor Shipley, interview; Haug, 1987).
At the industrial school the social exclusion of the girls was not complete as it was, for the most part, at the reformatory. Girls WERE allowed to maintain greater contact with the outside world. As mentioned earlier, after the Union Education Department took over the running of the school in 1917, some girls attended the local provincial school. Girls were also allowed to attend the cinema on Saturday afternoons, to receive visitors and parcels, to go camping during the holidays with the school, and to go home once a year, provided that their parents had made timely applications. They were constantly reminded, however, that these privileges depended on their good conduct, as well as on the material well-being of their families. The privilege of going home was frequently withheld, not because of the conduct of the girl, but on the grounds of the poverty of her parents (TA, UED, j). Several letters in the files testify to the often-unsuccessful appeals by parents to see their children. A typical one reads: I have 2 daughters in the Industrial School at Standerton who have been there seven years. I have applied for vacation leave before and got it; the principal now refuses because I am in arrears with fees (TA, UED, j). One mother who had been refused permission to take her daughters out, wrote back in frustration and with exquisite irony: 'If my home is not good enough for my own children to spend their vacation, I must point out that I have two more children in my custody, and they might just as well take these two from me' (TA, UED, j).
Thus both the reformatory and the industrial school operated as system of social exclusion. Mechanisms did exist in each, however, to demonstrate to the girls that a measure of inclusion in the wider ' society was possible, though conditional. In the reformatory it was conditional on the colour of the girl's skin and very grudgingly granted. In the industrial school it was conditional on the girl's conduct and on the conduct of her family, this being associated with financial respectability. If a girl conformed, she was drawn into the embrace of respectable white society, redeemed despite the taint of blood and history. If she rebelled, however, she was cast out to the reformatory. Here the form of inclusion came as an act of charity once twice a year. Its price and its purpose was the total social exclusion black girls in the institution.
CONCLUSION
From the mid-1930s onwards, conceptions of delinquency, the educability of girls and that of blacks began to change. Several factors combined to bring this about: the rise of manufacturing industry and its attendant segregationist ideology, the rapid urbanisation of blacks, and the emergence of a powerful class of professional child-savers. Amongst the new generation of liberal reformers, segregationist practices were increasingly justified on cultural rather than biological grounds, although beliefs about innate biological differences between blacks whites and between males and females had become part of commonsense ideology and were firmly entrenched in educational practices such as regular IQ testing (which continues to this day). In 1934 the administration of reformatories was transferred to theUnion Education Department. Colour boundaries became as rigidly fixed. After this period delinquent white girls were hardly ever sent to Eshowe but were more likely to be sent to the Durbanville Institute for Girls. Henceforward, although still marginalized, they were to be accommodated within the dominant racial hierarchy, through institutions whose social distancing from those for black was complete. Within this hierarchy, however, the reformatory and industrial school system continued to operate as a system of relative social exclusion for its inmates.
This chapter has shown how a notion of female deviance arose in early-twentieth-century South Africa which linked deviance to interracial sexuality on the part of white girls and the flouting of master servant relations in a colonial order on the part of black girls. The girls institutionalised at Eshowe and Standerton represented a minute fraction of a larger section of society that was transgressing the sexual racial and class codes of a segregated society. In criminalizing such actions and defining them as transgressions, the new white middle and ruling classes were participating in the process of regulating and defining 'normal' social and sexual relationships in the society.
'Normal' social and sexual relations between black and white and between the white unskilled or labouring and middle classes were further enforced in the rehabilitative regimes of the reformatory and the industrial school. By contrasting the practice of rehabilitation in the reformatory and in the industrial school, and looking within the reformatory at the different treatment of black and white girl chapter has also tried to show how the practice (as opposed I concept) of rehabilitation - in terms of training programmes and degree of exclusion from civil society - was contextually defined rehabilitation of white girls involved their conditional inch social and ideological structures of white supremacy, albeit members; the rehabilitation of black girls involved their incorporation as subject creatures into authoritarian domestic and unskilled wage relations. Yet, as the description of the riots which opened this chapter testifies, this strategy failed to produce unequivocally 'docile [female] bodies' or to control, within the institution, the growth of powerful networks of female solidarity (however temporary and flawed).