Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women: Correspondence of Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya (Killie Campbell Africana Library Publications)

Shula Marks

ISBN 10: 0869805428 / ISBN 13: 9780869805428

Published by University Kwazulu Natal Press, 1996

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women: Correspondence of Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer, and Sibusisiwe Makhanya (Killie Campbell Africana Library Publications)
• Publisher: University Kwazulu Natal Press
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0869805428
• ISBN 13: 9780869805428
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

If, for most of the past in most parts of the world, most women have been 'hidden from history', black women in South Africa have been doubly hidden, both as women and because they are black. Three women - two of them black - meet in the pages of this title. Lily Moya was a Transkei schoolgirl growing up in lonely and alien surroundings. She sought help with her education from Mabel Palmer, an elderly white academic, then Organiser of the Natal University College's Non-European section. The third was Subusisiwe Makhanya, a remarkable Zulu woman and a pioneer social worker. Their letters illuminate more of the South African condition than the majority of history textbooks; the generosities, yet humiliations, of white liberalism; the nature of mission education; the socialisation of black girls; and the dilemmas they confront. They also reveal the separate worlds which we all inhabit, but which are made more frightening and more separate by the divisions of age, ethnicity and race.

Review

" ... remarkable ..." Foreign Affairs " ... illuminates the workings of institutionalized racism through the correspondence of three South African women in the 1940s and '50s." Feminist Bookstore News "The history of a place and time is made vivid by the combination of the rich personal record of the letters and the theoretically framed analytic discussion. The result is new insight into the history of black education in South Africa, and a revealing study of the dynamics of women's relations under colonialism across the lines of race, age and power." Susan Greenstein, The Women's Review of Books "A riveting and revealing book one in which few of the characters wear hats that are spotlessly white." Third World Resources "This rich collection of letters deserves its own reading, as do Shula Marks's bracketing essays. They are invaluable for clarifying the myriad ramifications that the letters raise for African women." International Journal of African Historical Studies " ... powerful and perceptive...speak[s] eloquently to a Western audience that is poised to deal with the political and personal lives of South African women in an intimate holistic fashion." Belles Lettres