In 1930, the white South African parliament enfranchised women "of European descent." This legislation resulted from a long struggle by elite predominantly English-speaking white women for the granting of the vote to women on the same terms as men. From the late nineteenth century the conjoining of femininity with domesticity provided some suffragists with a platform from which to advocate votes for women. South African suffragists generally believed in the idea of maternal feminism current in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. Maternal feminism embraced the notion that women and men had different capacities and that women's maternal instincts and domestic experiences fit them for public service, particularly in rendering aid to the poor and infirm as well as legislating on matters affecting children. Suffragists thus argued for a "domestication of politics."l

In the South African case, appeals for women's suffrage, as well as the ultimate "success" of the suffrage movement, were also deeply entangled with the colonial condition. The women's suffrage movement emerged in the 1890s out of the milieu of temperance and women's reformist politics. The social purity movement united women, doctors, and male legislators around campaigns to stop vice, promote morality and to safeguard racial purity by preventing miscegenation.2 The impulses for the female vote were thus part of a complicated mixture of reformist idealism suffused with racially-coded ideologies of upliftment and degradation.