IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palscp/978-3-030-33412-3_18.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

African Women Farmers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, 1875–1930: State Policies and Spiritual Vulnerabilities

In: Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century

Author

Listed:
  • Sean Redding

    (Amherst College)

Abstract

As whites consolidated political control over South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economies of rural African families transformed. Redding investigates how, with the exodus of men as migrant labourers to the gold mines, African women became entrepreneurial market farmers in the Eastern Cape region. However, Redding contends, the colonial state’s legal restrictions on women’s property rights drained women’s economic resources and redefined them as dependents of men and ‘subsistence’ farmers. In tandem, accusations of witchcraft against women, often from relations or neighbours, increased as women exercised more power over familial resources. The cumulative impact of legal restrictions and witchcraft accusations threatened African women’s status and their opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial market farming by the late 1920s.

Suggested Citation

  • Sean Redding, 2020. "African Women Farmers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, 1875–1930: State Policies and Spiritual Vulnerabilities," Palgrave Studies in Economic History, in: Jennifer Aston & Catherine Bishop (ed.), Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century, edition 1, chapter 0, pages 433-453, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-030-33412-3_18
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-33412-3_18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-030-33412-3_18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.