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SECTION I RACE, QENDER and CONSUMERISM REWRITING PATRIARCHAL SCRIPTS: WOMEN, LABOR, and POPULAR CULTURE in SOUTH AFRICAN CLOTHING INDUSTRY BEAUTY CONTESTS, 1970S-2005

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SECTION I RACE, QENDER and CONSUMERISM REWRITING PATRIARCHAL SCRIPTS: WOMEN, LABOR, and POPULAR CULTURE in SOUTH AFRICAN CLOTHING INDUSTRY BEAUTY CONTESTS, 1970S-2005 SECTION I RACE, QENDER AND CONSUMERISM REWRITING PATRIARCHAL SCRIPTS: WOMEN, LABOR, AND POPULAR CULTURE IN SOUTH AFRICAN CLOTHING INDUSTRY BEAUTY CONTESTS, 1970s-2005 By Peter Alegi Michigan State University "Few countties take beauty pageants quite as setiously as South Aftica," noted The New York Times on the eve of the countty's fitst democtatic elections.' This national passion fot beauty contests ttaces its toots back to the 1920s and 1930s and ttanscends tace, class, and cultutal divisions. The populatity of non- commetcial beauty pageants thtoughout the countty signals that populat in- tetest extends fat beyond Miss South Africa and othet conventional contests. This study focuses on the histoty of the Spting Queen beauty festival in Cape Town's clothing industty: an exttaotdinaty festival of black^ female wotking- class cultute that hegan in 1980. "It's teally exciting and it's a lovely aftetnoon," temembeted Josie Atendse, a fotmet gatment wotket and shop stewatd; "when you watch and see all the people on the tamp and some of us just [laughs], you know, just fot the fun of it will entet. It's nice."^ By ptivileging the actions and petspectives of wotkets who expetienced the indignity of apattheid racism and eatned the lowest wages in the South Aftican clothing sectot,"* this atticle atgues that factory women putposefuUy ttansfotmed a seemingly banal and patriarchal beauty pageant into a cultutal ptoduction fot self-empowetment and trade union solidatity. The histotical significance of the Spting Queen is thteefold. Fitst, this lo- cal case study unveils a pootly documented yet intriguing aspect of the broader histoty and cultute of South Aftican women. Black women factory wotkets in South Aftica, the continent's most industtialized nation, remain marginalized in the histotiogtaphy to the point of neat invisibility.^ Mote than a decade af- tet the publication of histotian Itis Betget's seminal book Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980, the literature consists mainly of a small number of activists' memoits and institutional histoties of labot orga- nizations, as well as a handful of unpublished univetsity studies.^ By placing women's histotical experiences at centet stage and adopting a gendeted teading of history that incotpotates men, this study of wotkers' cultute in Cape garment factoties takes an apptoach favoted by influential feminist histotians of Aftica: "Gendet history cannot go fat without the continuous tettieval of women's his- toty," Paul Tiyambe Zeleza assetted, "while women's histoty cannot ttansfotm the fundamentally flawed paradigmatic bases of 'mainstteam' histoty without gendet histoty."^ Gendet and women's studies scholat Kathleen Canning, a spe- cialist in Eutopean and German history, recently seemed to echo Zeleza: "Rather than fitting gendet into the existent mainstteam, we might hope that its even- tual integration will mean altogether less ttuncated history, one that dissolves 32 joumal of social history fall 2008 the distinctions between epochal changes and histories of gender, wonien, and sexuality."^ Set in the rapidly changing social and political context of South Africa since the 1970s, this investigation of the Spring Queen attempts to do so by reconstructing and representing the sociability of proletarian women in relation to the dominant power of male managers, union comrades, and family members. The second reason why this study of the Spring Queen has relevance beyond South Africa and Africa is that it focuses on a gendered genre of popular cul- ture that connects workplace and community struggles, topics that labor and so- cial historians have traditionally tended to analyze separately.' While this union pageant shared the global logic of beauty contests in placing gender norms and idealized femininities on stage, it also provided a rare opportunity for factory women to publicly assert their human dignity, enhance their self-esteem, and claim equal rights as women and workers in a democratizing South Africa.'° At different moments, the selection of a Spring Queen as a symbol of collec- tive representation of garment workers bolstered, coexisted with, or endangered the status quo. It went from manufacturing quiescence in the workplace in the early 1980s to boosting democratic transformation in the clothing union in the 1990s. What is particularly interesting about the history of beauty competi- tions in South African garment factories is their capacity to fuse the domains of "home and work" by enabling women's performance of different femininities: "worker," "mother," "wife," "trade unionist," and "beauty queen." In the end, factory women's resistance against gender discrimination and their unabashed defense of femininity defies simple, neat categorization. This richly detailed study makes connections to trends identified in recent historical and ethnographic works devoted to beauty contests as a global form of popular culture "in which hegemonic intentions are accommodated, resisted, and reshaped in a variety of ways."" For example, beauty competitions in early Republican Turkey fostered vigorous public debates about women's bodies, sta- tus, and citizenship.'^ In postrevolutionary Mexico pageants became venues for the gendered construction of indigenismo, while in Guatemala at the height of the civil war they came to represent a newly resurgent Maya ethnicity.'^ In Jamaica and the United States beauty contests have provided venues for the expression of black femininity and pride.''' In inter-war Brazil and Japan pageants produced and symbolized emerging national and imperial identities and ideologies." As in all these cases, the women who participated in the Spring Queen in Cape Town were neither passive dupes nor independent heroines. This recognition brings us to the third and final reason for this study's larger significance: a methodological one. This article focuses on women's voices ex- cavated primarily through twenty oral history interviews (my own and those of others). Central to my historical reconstruction and interpretation, oral tes- timony revealed the multiple motivations, objectives, and meanings of women's actions, and their "strategic engagement" with the forces of capitalism, apartheid, and democratization.'^ Importantly, the interviews uncovered the emotional di- mension of the history of popular culture. Informants frequently referred to the "fun," camaraderie, and pride generated by the Spring Queen; other women remembered experiencing stress and anx' • ahead of the competition. These REWRITING PATRIARCHAL SCRIPTS 33 recollections humanized a painful past and encouraged me to look beyond an understanding of the beauty pageant as an offensive spectacle that sexually ob- jectifies women. Trade union newsletters, newspapers, and magazines such as Clothes Line and The Garment Worker proved invaluable in complementing the oral sources.'^ The "social" sections of these publications of the alternative press were filled with stories and photographs of industry beauty contests, as well as other work- ers' leisure practices, events rarely covered in the white-owned mainstream press.'^ Reflecting the masculine bias of official written documents, the archival records of the Garment Workers Union of South Africa, the National Union of Textile Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing &. Textile Workers' Union, and the Federation of South African Unions, which are housed at the University of Witwatersrand's CuUen Library, held limited information about Cape Town unions and even less bout women of color, let lone their leisure pursuits. It is hoped that future research visits will enable me to gain access to the archive of the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (SACTWU) in Salt River, Cape Town, which may also contain records of the Garment Workers Union of the Western Province and the Garment and Allied Worker's Union. The extreme paucity of conventional sources available on women in the Cape garment industry meant that the relationship between gender, labor, and culture in the Spring Queen could only be explored effectively through an interdisci- plinary approach that combined historical and ethnographic methodologies. Labor, Race, and Gender in South African History: A Brief Overview While it is not possible here to fully elaborate on the history of labor rela- tions in South Africa's clothing industry, it is necessary to outline the complex patterns of union organization in this manufacturing sector. Put simply, pro- found racial, gender, organizational, and political divisions defined the history of garment unions.'^ The first union in the clothing industry was the Witwa- tersrand Tailors' Association formed in 1918 in Johannesburg. The name of the organization changed to the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa in 1929- 30, shortly after Emil Solomon (Solly) Sachs, a socialist Jewish immigrant from Latvia, became general secretary (1928), a position which he held until 1952 when the apartheid regime forced him to leave the country after charging him under the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950.^° Divisions within the union were exacerbated by the actions of capitalist employers and the impact of racist legislation in the 1950s and 1960s. Militant trade unionism re-emerged with the 1973 Durban strikes and the formation in 1979 of the Federation of South African Trade Unions.^' After a decade of painstaking organizational capacity- building work and deepening political engagement, negotiations in the trade union movement
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