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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'My Own Mind Dying within Me': Eliza Fairbairn and the Reinvention of Colonial Middle Class Domesticity in Cape Town
Author:McKenzie, Kirsten
Year:1997
Periodical:South African Historical Journal
Issue:36
Pages:3-23
Language:English
Geographic terms:South Africa
Great Britain
Subjects:colonialism
women
family
biographies (form)
Women's Issues
History and Exploration
Urbanization and Migration
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Historical/Biographical
Cultural Roles
Family Life
Sex Roles
About person:Jean FairbairnISNI
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02582479708671266
Abstract:Over the course of the first half of the 19th century the infusion of British ideas about gender roles and domesticity led to essential changes in the nature of colonial identity at the Cape, South Africa. Roman Dutch law accorded Cape women far greater rights with respect to marriage and property than the British domestic ethos, which began to push women at the Cape into a greater degree of confinement within the domestic sphere. As was the case in Britain, the maintenance of a nonworking wife became an important signifier of middle-class status. The importance of respectable women withdrawing from the public sphere of paid employment into the role of wife and mother was personally experienced by Eliza Fairbairn (1812-1840), daughter of the missionary John Philip (1777-1851), and wife of the newspaper editor John Fairbairn (1792-1847). This article explores her life through a selection of her surviving correspondence, and aims thereby to shed light on the important role white women played as the bearers of cultural markers of middle-class identity - especially through the education of their children. Notes, ref.
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