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Abstract
ADAM: A Paper for Bachelors was published by the Central News Agency in Johannesburg from December 1920 to February 1922. The initial print run was 1 400 but by the third issue this had increased to 7 500. Although little is known about the target audience, from the content of the magazine and tone of voice of the editorial team it seems as though the intended readership was white, middle- and upper middle-class men living in Johannesburg, with a taste for entertainment that inculcates a certain Englishness. The magazine was edited by J.E. Cross, an Englishman who sailed to South Africa from London in 1915 at the age of 22 and presumably started ADAM at 27. This article is not about the readers or editors of ADAM. It is an analysis of the magazine and in particular the February 1921 issue as a sample of the magazine’s somewhat paradoxical gender politics. The article considers how ADAM employed the male gaze to gently undermine and ridicule the small steps being taken by women towards sexual liberation. I argue that while ADAM represents single women as independent, confident and modern, it also sexualises this ‘empowerment’ for a heterosexual, male audience. In particular, it uses subtle mockery to undermine whatever authority and agency women are afforded on its pages.
Notes
1 S. Dubow, ‘Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of “South Africanism”, 1902–10’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), 53–85. See also J. Lambert, ‘South African British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s’, South African Historical Journal, 43,1 (2000), 197–198.
2 Dubow, ‘Colonial Nationalism’, 57.
3 Lambert, ‘South African British?’, 199.
4 Ibid., 204.
5 Ibid.
6 ADAM closed in February 1922. On 2 January of that year, after the gold price had dropped markedly, a strike began among white miners who protested the laying off of 2000 out of 25,000 white miners and the removal of the colour bar. By aligning the wages of white and black miners, the capitalists hoped to save money but this decision prompted what became known as the Rand Revolution. The strike was eventually stopped by a military intervention in which 200 people died. It is difficult to know whether these events impacted in any way on ADAM or led to its demise. It is nevertheless probable that the softer, more urbane or cosmopolitan masculine ideal so ably and consistently represented by ADAM must have seemed frivolous at this particular moment in Johannesburg and that this may have impacted sales. See Y. Béliard, ‘A “Labour War” in South Africa: The 1922 Rand Revolution in Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought’, Labor History, 57, 1 (2016), 20–34; and D. Moodie, ‘Maximum Average Violence: Underground Assaults on the South African Gold Mines, 1913–1965’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31, 3 (September 2005), 553.
7 The art editor is noted as a W.H. Kirby. Walter H. Kirby was the artist for the Sporting Star until the outbreak of the First World War. He published a collection of humorous sketches called Hunting the Hun in British South West Africa, a Series of Sketches on the Humorous Side of the GSWA Campaign by One Who Was There in 1915 (published by Argus Printing & Publishing in Johannesburg).
8 A. Hadland, E. Louw, S. Sesanti and H. Wasserman, ‘Introduction’, in A. Hadland, E. Louw, S. Sesanti and H. Wasserman, eds, Power, Politics and Identity in South African Media (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 2.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 The cause of the suffragettes in the West and in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century had been closely aligned with social reform movements such as temperance, the reformation of sex workers, education of prisoners and the abolition of slavery (in the United States). Middle-class women enlisted these causes as a means of attaining the highly prized Victorian female virtues of modesty, caring, homeliness and generosity (as well as sexual purity). Women who were fighting for various noble causes started to realise their need for political equality in order to be heard on matters such as temperance and the eradication of slavery. These were often the same women who were involved in the fight for the vote. See H.M. Lewis, ‘The Woman Movement and the Negro Movement’ (MA thesis, University of Virginia, 1949); S. Rowbotham, Hidden from History (London: Pluto, 1973); C. Walker, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement: The Politics of Gender, Race and Class’, in C. Walker, ed., Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town: David Phillip; London: James Currey, 1990), 316 and 319.
11 Walker argues that it was the primary aim of General Hertzog, of the ruling National Party, and his government ‘after it came to power in 1924 to sweep away [the rights of African voters] and establish the unadulterated white supremacy of the northern provinces throughout the country’ (Walker, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement’, 314). Walker continues that ‘[m]ost suffragists resented having their own enfranchisement delayed by the haggling over the Cape franchise [where select Africans had a vote] and ultimately identified themselves with the government’s segregationist policies’ (Walker, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement’, 314).
12 Walker, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement’, 316.
13 Ibid.
14 A. Meares, The New Woman (London and Glasgow: William Collins Sons, 1974), 11.
15 T. Schaffer, ‘“Nothing but Foolscap and Ink”: Inventing the New Woman in Fiction and Fact’, in A. Richardson and C. Willis, eds, Fin-de-siècle Feminisms (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 39.
16 Ibid.
17 L. Stanley, Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman: Olive Schreiner’s Social Theory (Durham, UK: Sociology Press, 2002), 25.
18 I. Hofmeyer, ‘Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Ethnic Identity, 1902–1924’, in S. Marks and S. Trapido, eds, The Politics of Race, Class & Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (Harlow: Longman, 1987), 113.
19 Ibid.
20 L. Viljoen and S. Viljoen, ‘Constructing Femininity in Huisgenoot’, in J. van Eeden and A. du Preez, eds, South African Visual Culture (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 2005), 110.
21 C. Glaser, ‘Managing the Sexuality of Urban Youth: Johannesburg, 1920s–1960s’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38, 2 (2005), 304.
22 Ibid., 310.
23 In the United States, the flappers were often associated with a disdain for Prohibition and were widely associated with a more independent aura than that of the Gibson Girls of the 1890s (see K. de Castelbajac, The Face of the Century: 100 Years of Makeup and Style [New York: Rizzoli, 1995]).
24 L. Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 13.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 P. Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Hoban Wieland (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 171.
28 Walker, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement’, 321. The changing perceptions around women and the more emphatic entrance of women into the marketplace did not always manifest as an empowerment of women. Herman Giliomee moots that by 1924, Afrikaner women had gone from militant rebels in the struggle for Afrikaner independence and active political participants to passive and conservative subordinates. He couples this shift with the rise of the National Party. See H. Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 376. McClintock adds that the journey towards Afrikaner nationalism ‘proceed[ed] forwards in geographical space, but backwards in racial and gender time, to what [was] figured as a prehistoric zone of linguistic, racial and gender “degeneration”’. See A. McClintock, ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’, Feminist Review, 44, 61 (1993), 69, 80.
29 J. Rose, ‘We Need a Bold, Scandalous Feminism’, The Guardian, 17 October 2014.
30 L. McLoughlin, The Language of Magazines (London: Routledge, 2000), 5.
31 Glaser, ‘Managing the Sexuality of Urban Youth’, 311–312.
32 Ibid.
33 Leach explains that the ‘desire to show things off, to publicize or to advertise whatever […] capitalism yielded, marked a critical moment in the formation of a new culture of consumption’, and that ‘the desire to show things off [as in a department store] helped to loosen the resistance to personal sexual display’. W.R. Leach, ‘Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925’, The Journal of American History, 71, 2 (1984), 325.
34 L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3 (Autumn 1975), 14.
35 Ibid., 26.
36 Killarney Film Studios was founded by American Isidore W. Schlesinger in 1915 in Johannesburg. This was the first South African film studio. Schlesinger also set up African Film Productions, which produced 43 films between 1916 and 1922.
37 A. Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 151.
38 Ibid., 152.
39 The February 1921 issue contains images of 34 women and 19 (56 per cent) of these are in advertisements. There are 26 men represented visually, 20 (77 per cent) of which are in advertisements.
40 J. Rose, Women in Dark Times (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 12.
41 The luxury status of the Buick might prompt the Marxist sentiment that ‘the shiny surfaces of the commodity world conceal a less pleasant, sometimes bleak working world’ (Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 174).
42 J. van Eeden, ‘Picturing the Road: Automobility in Selected South African Postcards’, Communication, 38, 1 (2012), 88.
43 R. Dyer, Pastiche (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 122.
44 This trope of flirtatious femininity would have been less familiar then than it is now and therefore less of a pastiche. One must guard against reading the images in ADAM with a twenty-first-century knowingness, but the stereotype that women desire to be desired was surely familiar even then.
45 Rose, Women in Dark Times, 14.
46 The desire to be looked at is not unlike a need to be ‘consumed’. Writing about feminine typologies in the 1920s, Liz Conor states that the ‘type of the City Girl was discursively negotiated alongside older feminine street presences, such as the prostitute, and this association was played out in changing perceptions of commodity exchange, traffic, movement, contemplation, and visual distraction’ (Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 11).
47 Rose, Women in Dark Times, xi.
48 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 16.
49 Ibid.
50 ADAM, February 1921, 17.
51 Ibid.
52 The content of the feature comprises various short commentaries about cars and ends with a story about a car, which was stolen and then returned after a night out, the petrol tank empty and with fish and chips on the front seat. Following this, there are some suggested means of preventing car theft, but the tone throughout is comedic rather than informative.
53 ADAM, February 1921, 13.
54 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 22.
55 Ibid., 23.
56 ADAM, February 1921, 7.
57 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 21.
58 Black men and women do not appear anywhere in ADAM except, once or twice, in advertisements. In an advertisement for Durand & Bowden commercial printers in the February 1921 issue, for instance, an African man is racing on a bicycle to deliver a package. The sign on his bicycle says ‘Durand & Partners’ and beneath him is the caption, ‘We Rush Your Rush Orders!’ Conor argues that ‘if practices of appearing – the performance of techniques of appearing – became a means to produce oneself as the ideal modern feminine subject, they were also deployed to disqualify women from the modern scene’. Since the flapper’s presence in the visual economy of the 1920s echoed a modernity of sorts, then one might argue that black women and men ‘were systematically constructed as premodern or “primitive” precisely through their perceived failure to appear’ in ADAM (Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 12, emphasis in original).
59 W. Beinart and S. Dubow, ‘Introduction: The Historiography of Segregation and Apartheid’, in W. Beinart and S. Dubow, eds, Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.
60 Ibid., 4.
61 Ibid., 7.
62 Ibid.
63 Beinart and Dubow indicate that ‘cultural relativism’ was gaining traction with segregationist ideologues who felt the need to defend cultural ‘integrity’ or differences between cultures (Beinart and Dubow, ‘Introduction’, 11). This tenet would become an important one in the age of apartheid when the hope of maintaining separate cultural identities for white and black South Africans was promoted by the National Party, but was also evident in earlier, subtler ways such as ADAM’s singular and exclusive espousal of Englishness.
64 C. van der Westhuizen, ‘Afrikaners in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Inward Migration and Enclave Nationalism’, HTS Teologiese Studies, 72, 1 (2016), 4, https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.72i1.3351.
65 A. Petersen, Unmasking the Masculine: ‘Men’ and ‘Identity’ in a Sceptical Age (London: SAGE, 1998), 14.
66 This article explores the vantage point that would most typically be that of the white, English, heterosexual man as the dominant reading community or culture. I am interested in how the magazine normalises this specific culture of looking. There would, however, necessarily have been diverse readers and subject positions from which to interpret or interrogate the magazine and, of course, even white, heterosexual men may have been critical of ADAM’s gender politics.
67 The shop where every item described is available is noted in the text, but not the price. Chudleigh’s, Maison Camille and T.G. Jones & Co. are some of the stores mentioned.
68 ADAM, February 1921, 26.
69 E. Rosenthal, The Garlick Story (Unpublished Manuscript, 2015), 6.
70 F. Gill, The Story of Stuttafords (Cape Town: Cape Town Limited, 1957), 9.
71 The Union of South Africa was established in 1910, after the South African War ended in 1902. The output of manufacturers almost tripled in the Union during the First World War. By 1923, the gold standard and pre-war price conditions had once again been restored. ‘The return to the gold standard was said to be one of the causes leading to […] the Great Depression, lasting from 1929–32’ (Stuttaford, in Gill, The Story of Stuttafords, 9).
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Conor describes the prominence of the Mannequin as a 1920s feminine typology that epitomises a culture of display: ‘the Mannequin, as both a live fashion model and an inorganic replica […] acted as a motif for the iconization of the feminine created by globalizing commodity culture. She embodied the ways that changes in modern consumer practices affected notions of display and the refiguring of commodity aesthetics in the department store and the ready-to-wear industry’. The mass-produced, idealised feminine bodies of contemporary mannequins ‘stood in for street presence, inviting women to strike a pose within the play of looks in the metropolis’ (Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 11 and 12).
75 N. Sanger, ‘“There’s Got to Be a Man in There”: Reading Intersections between Gender, Race and Sexuality in South African Magazines’, African Identities, 6, 3 (2008), 277, http://doi.org/10.1080/14725840802223598.
76 Rose, Women in Dark Times, 5.
77 Susan Sontag, ‘An Argument about Beauty’, Dædalus (Fall 2002), 24.
78 Ibid., 25.
79 ADAM, February 1921, 6.
80 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 20.
81 Ibid., 21.
82 S. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 25.
83 Ibid.
84 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 15.
85 Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 172.
86 Ibid.
87 L. Wilbraham, ‘“Few of Us Are Potential Miss South Africas, But … ”: Psychological Discourses about Women’s Bodies in Advice Columns’, South African Journal of Psychology, 26, 3 (1996), 163.
88 Van der Westhuizen, ‘Afrikaners in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, 7.
89 Sanger, ‘“There’s Got to Be a Man in There”’, 277.
90 P. Jackson, N. Stevenson and K. Brooks, Making Sense of Men’s Magazines (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 129–130.
91 Glaser, ‘Managing the Sexuality of Urban Youth’, 306.
92 See C. van der Westhuizen, ‘Power and Insecurity: The Politics of Globalisation’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 65, 1 (2009), 617.
93 Petersen, Unmasking the Masculine, 1.
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Notes on contributors
Stella Viljoen
STELLA VILJOEN is Associate Professor in Visual Studies at Stellenbosch University. She is the chair of the Department of Visual Arts. Her research is primarily concerned with the representation of gender in periodicals, and she is especially interested in the ways in which South African culture is entangled in the styles, aesthetic traditions and visual paradigms of the Global North.