Abstract
In colonial settler societies, a shortage of white marriageable women was often a concern, and until 1936, there were more white men that white women in Cape Town. The question of who marries who becomes particularly interesting in such contexts, especially in light of a constant stream of European immigrants to the city in the first half of the 20th-century. In our previous work, we discussed the merits of church marriage records as a source. Here we analyse marriage records from 1930 to 1970 and a household survey from 1938 to 1939 to gain insights into how immigrants acted in the marriage market in Cape Town during the period, with a focus on white inhabitants of the city in the context of a historical shortage of white women.
Contribution: In this preliminary study, we find that most immigrants married other immigrants, and that if immigrant women married South African-born men, they married the wealthier men.
Keywords: marriage history; Cape Town; immigration history; marriage records; marriage migration; bride deficits; sex ratios; gender ratios.
Introduction
Marriage in the colonies and in the politics and discourses of empire was a powerful signifier of stability, respectability and successful colonisation.1
Colonial settler societies often experience a shortage of marriageable women from the sending regions (such as white European women in South Africa in the colonial period).2 Courtwright found that there were more men than women in the United States until 1946 and argued that the historical patterns of violence in the United States can be traced to its history of violence caused by large groups of men remaining unmarried.3 In these contexts, marriage was also seen as a ‘civilizing force and as a measure of civilization’.4 In 1941, while England was being battered by the Blitz, a 38-year-old British man who described himself as a ‘tennis racket specialist’ married a 32-year-old Capetonian typist, Miss Reid, in Durbanville, a relatively new suburb of the city, 30 km from the Cape Town harbour. He was 6 years older than her, and both of them had jobs at the time of their marriage. Both the bride and the groom were marrying for the first time in their thirties. Was this normal for all Cape Town couples, or did being an immigrant affect age at first marriage? Marriage between immigrants and South African-born individuals raises a number of questions, especially in the context of a history of a lower number of white women than men in Cape Town. How common were unions between immigrants? How many immigrant women were there? Did immigrants usually marry other immigrants? Did immigrant men and women act differently from each other? Was there a ‘demand’ for immigrant women?
The decision to marry is a significant one in a person’s life and even more so for women in the past. Immigration is just as significant and plays an important role in marriage markets; for some, marriage could even be a reason to migrate. Whether people migrate to marry, marry to migrate or migrate married, both life decisions influence where a person lives, their relationships with their family of origin, their occupation and their position in society.5 If a certain area does not have enough marriage partners for those of a certain age and sex, they might move elsewhere to find a suitable marriage partner, just as they would if they could not find a job. On the other hand, staying in that area could mean marrying someone from a different socio-economic class or age group.
Female deficits, in the form of a shortage of marriageable women, exist in China and India: in China because of past policies and practices that encouraged sex-specific abortions and infanticide and in India because of differing healthcare by sex.6 In France in the late 20th-century, bride deficits existed in rural areas because French women did not want a life of farming and the hard work it entails.7 Historically, settler societies experienced shortages of women because men were more likely to migrate to colonial frontiers than women were. By the beginning of the 20th-century, the City of Cape Town, and the Cape province as a whole, still had fewer women than men. Bickford-Smith et al. say that white women ‘being in short supply, were to be cherished’, and they note that the ‘fear that British men might intermarry with Boer or black women helped spur the vigorous promotion of female immigration’.8 This shortage led to the establishment of the British Women’s Emigration Association in the 1880s. The association expressed concern about excess women in Britain and, seeing British women as ‘racially superior, the model of refined motherhood and a civilising agent’, encouraged them to emigrate to British colonies.9 Research into whether single British women actually moved to the colonies remains scarce.
Among the consequences of a female deficit are high proportions of the male population remaining unmarried and a prevalence of prostitution. Some even argue that as most crime is committed by unmarried men, a female deficit and the corresponding surplus of unmarried men can lead to an increase in crime.10 A normal sex ratio is 101–106 male births for every 100 female births, with a ratio of as low as 60 males to 100 females in older populations because of sex differences in mortality and health outcomes.11 In 1904, there were 121 white men to 100 white women in the Cape province. This white female deficit persisted for the first decades of the 20th-century, and it was not until 1946 that there were more white men than white women in the Cape province although normal sex ratios had been reached in the city by the time that the 1936 census was conducted.12 In 1949, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act made interracial marriages illegal in South Africa. Even before this, only a very small percentage of marriages were interracial. In the Cape province, there was a deficit of coloured women up until 1951, a discovery that deserves further research.13
To the best of our knowledge, no research has been done to understand the relationship between immigration and marriage in Cape Town in the 20th-century, considering the history of a female deficit and complex racial politics. For the period 1930 to 1970, we investigated marriage records to understand whether the marriage patterns of women who immigrated to Cape Town differed from those of native-born women; how their immigrant status influenced their choices and opportunities in the marriage market; whether they were more likely to marry within their own immigrant communities or to integrate into the local population by marrying native-born men and whether the historical context of a female deficit in Cape Town and the Cape made immigrant women marry earlier, given the high demand for marriageable women or whether they delayed marriage because of the agency they had because of that demand. Understanding these dynamics will shed light on the broader social and economic implications of immigration and marriage in early 20th-century Cape Town, particularly in a context of racial tensions, gender imbalances and evolving social norms.
We examined a variety of sources that provide information on marriage and immigration at the beginning of the 20th-century: Anglican marriage records, a household survey and newspapers. The marriage records provide details for each member of a couple, including place of birth, nationality, place of residence at the time of the marriage and occupation. The occupations in the marriage records have been coded using the historical international classification of occupations (HISCO). We used these codes to determine whether immigrants married at their socio-economic level. Questions we asked were: Who were these immigrants? What jobs did they do? Were these jobs different from immigrants’ jobs? Did immigrants find marriage partners born in Cape Town, or those who migrated from other parts of South Africa? Did immigrants introduce new skills? Was marrying a recent international immigrant a form of upward mobility? Did immigrants marry interracially? Overall, we want to understand the significance of marriages between immigrants to the city and people who were born in South Africa, as related to the context of fewer white women than men that had lasted for over 250 years since the inception of the Cape Colony. Some research has been done on the lives of the immigrants in Cape Town but little so far on marriage.
The context
Cape Town is a melting pot of creeds and cultures today and has been since its foundation. Some of the city’s inhabitants can trace their ancestry to 17th-century Dutch settlers. From the onset of British administration of the Cape, a steady stream of British people moved to South Africa to the colony, reducing the influence of the Dutch population in the area. In the 20th-century, political refugees from Europe and others in search of a better life made their way to Cape Town. These immigrants influenced life in the city in tangible ways. For instance, in the first half of the 20th-century, foreign-born grooms were far more likely to sign antenuptial contracts than those born in South Africa. This seems to have been the case because the marriage laws in South Africa were more restrictive than those in European countries at the time.14
The early days of the Colony at the time of the involvement of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) were characterised by a shortage of white women as was the case in other settler societies.15 Women were not employed by the VOC, and if male employees were married, it was costly for them to bring their wives to the Cape from the Netherlands. The low wages paid by the Colony meant that it was mostly single men who made the journey. In frontier districts in 1713, there were only 100 white settler adult women for every 224 white settler adult men. In Cape Town, the situation was slightly better with 174 settler men to every 100 settler women.16 By 1936, before World War II and the losses of males in that time, and despite the continued fears at the beginning of the century and the lower number of white women in the province as a whole, Cape Town was home to more women than men, with a sex ratio for adults over 21 years old of 114 females to every 100 males or 86 males for every 100 females. This is closer to the normal ratio for adults over 21, although higher than the global ratio in 1950, which was 80 males for every 100 females.17 As most international immigrants to Cape Town in the 20th-century were of European or British descent, we focused on white individuals in the records and investigated whether this history of a shortage of white women affected marriage and immigration trends in Cape Town.
At the beginning of the 20th-century, the Cape Colony, and particularly Cape Town, was a desirable destination for European migrants looking for a new life. There were, however, concerns about European and other white Capetonians migrating to other parts of the Union of South Africa,18 other colonies or back to Europe. One reason that was given for this outmigration was the ‘decadence’ of the city.19 Despite these concerns, those in power did not always welcome immigrants. Bradlow notes that after 1910, South African Governments were torn between augmenting the white population ‘whilst controlling the entry of unskilled immigrants who would not be allowed to compete, originally with cheap, black labour and later with unskilled whites’.20 On the other hand, many were concerned that the immigration laws were too strict, and one article complains that a young man was accepted as an immigrant to the United States of America, after being refused entry by the Transvaal authorities, and a young woman was also denied entry because she failed the education test.21
Although the government wanted to maintain white supremacy through immigration, there was a feeling that the union could not absorb immigrants in the same way that Australia and Canada were able to. Instead there was pressure for South Africa to only accept European immigrants who were artisans.22 According to Bradlow, three themes defined immigration in South Africa in the post-Union era. Firstly, the government was determined to prevent more immigrants from Asia and particularly India. Secondly, they wanted to limit European immigrants who were viewed as having a potentially harmful impact on South Africa’s white population. For instance, legislation was designed especially to prevent Eastern European Jews from entering the country. Thirdly, immigration was encouraged from European countries that were considered to be suitable sending areas because it was believed that those immigrants would have a positive effect on South Africa. The countries on the ‘good’ list included Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia.
Push factors for European migrants in the 20th-century, included a desire for political freedom, as in the case of Eastern European Jews and the Irish. The World Wars were also push factors, with refugees being forced to leave their home country. For many, such as Madeirans, their home did not offer the future they hoped for. Dribe et al. found that in Sweden at the end of the 19th-century, marriage market imbalances (demographic factors that make it difficult to find a spouse) were not a push factor, but that during industrialisation, migration did play an important role in the intergenerational social mobility of women.23
Pull factors included contacts with people who had settled in the area. Sammy Marks (1844–1920), a Lithuanian-born Jew who became a successful businessman in South Africa, is believed to have been responsible for the migration of most of the Jews from his birthplace in Lithuania to the Transvaal. His story also sheds light on the nature of the journeys that were embarked on by those who settled in South Africa. Born in Neustadt-Sugind to a father who worked as a tailor, he travelled to England during his youth and stayed there so as to avoid the persecution of Jews in his home country. In 1869, on hearing of the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley, he travelled to the Cape. At the age of 40 years, after amassing considerable wealth, he was still a bachelor. He did not find a suitable wife in the Colony and returned to England to do so.24
Literature on migration to South Africa in the 20th-century has highlighted the role of marriage in the migration experience. Glaser (2012) found that Madeiran men usually travelled to South Africa by themselves, and if they were married, their wives and children only arrived later. In other cases, long-distance arranged marriages took place, with the bride marrying a proxy for her groom who was already living in South Africa. Indian women also had the experience of a husband living in another country, with men initially moving to South Africa by themselves. Sometimes couples were reunited after years, if at all. Dhupelia-Mesthrie found that Indian women were hesitant to leave India to join their husbands. The rate of wives travelling to South Africa to meet their husbands increased slightly in 1927, when a law was passed in the Union that required Indian women to travel with their children who were minors, although women did sometimes travel back to India once they had accompanied their children to settle in South Africa. In the late 19th-century, Indians were brought to the Colony of Natal as indentured labourers. The Cape Colony did not do this, and Indian migrants began moving freely to the Cape. Numbers grew from 1453 in 1891 to 10 508 in 1936.25
Despite the important role of marriage in the lives of migrants to South Africa, there has been little focus on exogamy in Cape Town. In other words, we do not know who married foreigners or whether immigrants to the city married immigrants from other places or how many immigrants married locals.
Sources
Marriage records from the Anglican church in Cape Town show who immigrants married in the period 1939 to 1971.26 The complete Anglican marriage records dataset provides information about Anglicans who lived in Cape Town from 1865 to 1964. This dataset was transcribed by the Biography of an Uncharted People project from records found on Family Search, which were digitised by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For this paper, we use the records from 1939 to 1971 because of the consistent addition of birthplace and female occupation to the marriage records by 1939 and because the government moved the administration of marriages away from churches in the 1970s, therefore reducing the number of church marriage records available. The Anglican church was the single biggest Christian denomination for white people in Cape Town for the period being studied. In the 1936 census, there were 54 839 white Anglicans in Cape Town, representing 36% of the city’s white population, followed by the Dutch Reformed Church with 28 981 members.27 The dataset includes just over 1000 black28 couples. The number is small because the city’s black population was small during the period covered by the dataset and because the Anglican church was not as popular with the black population as it was with the coloured and white populations. In 1936, the black population of Cape Town was only 14 160, representing 7% of the city’s inhabitants in that year.29
Another source we used is a household survey conducted in the Cape Town in 1938–1939. With just over 1000 households surveyed, it is not as large as the marriage record dataset. Moreover, it does not represent a change over time, but it does provide useful information on the birthplaces of heads of households and their spouses as well as the year they came to Cape Town and the year that they married. It also lists occupations and household income. From this source, we can determine how many immigrants met and married someone in the city as opposed to marrying someone and then travelling to a new country. We can also determine the income differences between households headed by a foreign-born man and those headed by a South African-born man.
While the Anglican marriage records might suffer from some selection bias, the household survey was conducted using random sampling to gain an accurate representation of the households in Cape Town at the time. The marriage records only capture those who married in Cape Town, while the household survey shows who arrived in the city already married or how much time passed between arriving in the city and marrying. Although both the survey and marriage records represent households of different races, since most immigrants were white, our study focused on households that had a white household head. There were 500 households with a white household head in the Batson Household Survey. By supplementing the household survey and marriage records with articles from the newspaper the Cape Times, we gained both quantitative and qualitative perspectives on marriage and immigration in the city. The Cape Times also provided historical context before the period studied.
Population statistics for Cape Town in 1936 show that the city had attracted a diversity of immigrants. Of the white adults living in the city in that year, 13% were born in other southern African British protectorates or colonies, 13% were born in Britain and 15% were born in other parts of the world, such as the Americas. City-level data are not available for other races, but the 1936 census shows that in the Union as a whole, 1287 coloured people were born in South-West Africa (Namibia), 896 in St Helena, 299 in Mauritius, 250 in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 247 in Lesotho, 144 in Mozambique, 102 in Swaziland, 93 in Tanzania, 92 in Malawi and 75 in Kenya.30
Immigrants and marriage in Cape Town
Table 1 shows the immigrants listed in the Anglican marriage records dataset by birthplace. Canada and Australia have been listed separately because they were also British dominions during the period being studied. Immigrants from the United Kingdom are the most numerous in the records, unsurprisingly, as South Africa was a British protectorate and the records are from the Anglican church (the Church of England) in Cape Town. England was the ‘mother country’ for English speakers in the City.31 Of the 14,700 marriages recorded from 1939 to 1971 at the Anglican church in Cape Town, only 828 (6%) had a foreign-born spouse. Of the 500 households with a white household head in the household survey, 369 (74%) contained a married couple. Of those married couples, 137 (37%) had a foreign-born spouse. Immigrants were therefore far more numerous in the city than the Anglican marriage records suggest, although the household survey does also represent those who married overseas and then moved to Cape Town.
| TABLE 1: International birthplaces listed in the marriage records, 1939–1971. |
Civil marriage records in Cape Town did not list birthplace or nationality, but other churches did. Although we lacked the resources to transcribe the records of other denominations, looking at the marriages recorded in the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town for 1 year, we find foreigners present. From 1928 to 1929, there were 79 marriages in the Groote Kerk, the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town and two of those record foreign-born grooms. Surprisingly, considering the animosity between the British and Afrikaners in the wake of the South African War, both grooms were born in England.32 For the same period, there were 836 marriages in Anglican churches in the City, with only four of those having a foreign-born groom. None of the Anglican records for 1928 to 1929 had a foreign-born bride. There is much room for future research that compares marriage trends between denominations at a city and country level. Table 2 shows that immigrants were underrepresented in the Anglican marriage records. What we can see from the marriage records is that most immigrants to the city continued to be men.
| TABLE 2: Comparing birth places in census and marriage records. |
Another way to explain the low number of marriages with an immigrant spouse in the Anglican marriage records is that couples might have married before coming to Cape Town. This is not visible in the Anglican marriage records, but the household survey provides the date of arrival in Cape Town and the date of marriage, making it apparent that immigrants moved to South Africa as a married couple and when they married overseas and arrived separately. In the household survey, 19% of married couples were an immigrant groom and bride, 12.5% an immigrant groom and a South African-born bride, 5.5% a South African-born groom and an immigrant bride and 63% a South African-born groom and bride. As there was still a surplus of white men in the city at the time, this could suggest that white South African women tended to choose an immigrant rather than a South African for their husband.
Table 3 shows that 40% of the marriages between two immigrants occurred after arrival in Cape Town. According to the survey, 19% of marriages between immigrants occurred in their home country and then one spouse travelled to South Africa and the other followed. In one case in the household survey where the wife travelled to South Africa first, the couple had married in 1924 in Lithuania and the wife had moved to South Africa in 1929 and the husband in 1934. By 1939, they had two sons, aged 10 and 11 years, so it is also possible that the wife travelled to Cape Town with their children.33 Some couples arrived in the same year, unmarried and went on to marry later. Table 3 shows the timing of marriages between immigrants. This staggered arrival in the country could cause problems for the married couple. A Cape Town newspaper reported on a case in 1910. The couple in question married in Wales in 1906 and the husband travelled to South Africa a few months later. He wrote to his wife, but she did not respond to his letters. In 1908, she arrived in South Africa and admitted to committing adultery with a man in London and to having a son with him. Her husband requested a divorce in South Africa in 1910.34
| TABLE 3: Timing of foreign-foreign marriages (N = 72). |
Foreign-born individuals marrying South-African-born individuals represent 18% of the marriages in the survey. Table 4 shows that most foreigners (whether men or women) lived in Cape Town for more than a decade before marrying a South African. It was, however, far more likely for foreign-born women who married South Africans to marry in the year of their arrival than it was for South African men who married foreign-born women. This suggests that these men had some form of contact with the women before marrying them, perhaps meeting them overseas or becoming acquainted through correspondence, after which the bride would travel to Cape Town and the couple would marry immediately. An example from a newspaper describes an English bride from Cornwall arriving in Cape Town the day before her wedding, where she married a Mr Ernest Pearce of Messrs. Pearce Bros. of Germiston, Transvaal. They married in a congregational church and honeymooned in the Cape after travelling to the Transvaal where they would live.35 Table 4 also shows the different trends for foreign-born men marrying foreign-born women and foreign-born men marrying South African women.
| TABLE 4: Timing of marriages after arriving in Cape Town for brides and grooms. |
In the case of an immigrant couple, the bride might arrive a few years later. An example from the survey is Mr Engelmann, who moved to Cape Town from the Netherlands in 1921, at the age of 24 years, and his bride from the same country who moved to the city in 1923 where they married that year. By 1938, at the time of the household survey, Mr Engelmann was working as the secretary of the United Party and Mrs Engelmann was a librarian. The comments section on the survey card says: ‘These are cultured people with a high standard of living’.36 It would usually be the woman who arrived a year or two later, but in one rare case in the survey, a Lithuanian man arrived in the city in 1910, returned to Lithuania in 1911 where he got married and was joined by his wife in Cape Town in 1918. It may be that his trip to Cape Town in 1910 was a scouting mission. By 1938, the couple were living in the city and had two daughters working outside of the home, one aged 18 years and one 21 years. The comments section on the survey card for this household notes that these daughters were born from the wife’s first marriage, suggesting that either the dates were incorrectly communicated or this woman might have had two husbands for a short time.
Because populations around the world were increasingly mobile, cases of bigamy became more widespread from the 19th-century, onwards. In 1891, The Central Law Journal picked up on this trend and stated that as ‘emigration flows in a continuous stream from east to west, trials for bigamy become more frequent in the States and territories west of the Mississippi’ (Central Law Journal, ‘Bigamy’, 1891). In 1905 at the Cape, a man claimed to believe that there was no legal impediment to marrying someone new in his new country, saying: ‘I was led to believe that the second marriage would be valid, providing the first wife did not set foot in South Africa’.37 This case was seen as unusual. More frequently, husbands left their wives in Europe or Britain, travelled to South Africa and their wives never heard from them again. These wives would then place advertisements in South African newspapers to try to find their missing husband in order to divorce him.38 Advertisements were also placed by unmarried immigrant men and women seeking a spouse. One read: ‘A gentleman, formerly Officer of the Gorman Guards, is desirous of forming an acquaintance with a wealthy lady (widow eligible) with a view to matrimony’.39
Fourie and Inwood found that white men were more likely to marry interracially than white women in Cape Town, because of the shortage of white women in the city.40 On the evidence in the household survey, it seems that white foreign-born men were more likely than white South African-born men to marry interracially. However, in the survey, only eight interracial marriages (2% of marriages) had a white groom, four of them foreign born. Only one white woman married interracially, and that was to a man from South America.
Figure 1 shows that the most common type of marriage involving immigrants in the Anglican marriage records was between immigrants from different countries or regions. ‘Exogamous F (foreign)’ refers to a marriage between immigrants from two different countries or regions, ‘Exogamous SA’ refers to a marriage between an immigrant and a South African and ‘Endogamous’ refers to a marriage between immigrants from the same country or two South Africans marrying.
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FIGURE 1: Types of marriages between immigrants in the Anglican marriage records in Cape Town, 1924–1970. |
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The second most common type of marriage involving immigrants was between an immigrant and a South African, and the least common was between immigrants from the same country or region. Figure 1 shows an increase in marriages between immigrants in the city during World War II. This is noteworthy because, as Table 1 shows, most immigrants in the dataset were British born, and there is a gender imbalance for all sending regions. Immigrants mostly married other immigrants. One example of this is Mr Ranby, 27 years, and his bride Miss Mamo, 34 years. When they married in 1941, he worked as an engineer’s fitter and she was a nurse. He was born in England and she was born in Egypt, a different country but one affiliated to Britain at the time.
In the household survey, immigrants were also more likely to marry other immigrants: 22% of couples were both foreign and 18% had one foreign-born spouse. As stated earlier, the survey recorded far more marriages with a foreign-born spouse than the Anglican marriage records did. A difference in the household survey is that immigrants who married in Cape Town were most likely to marry an immigrant from their country of birth, while in the Anglican marriage records, they were most likely to marry an immigrant from a different country. In other words, couples consisting of two foreign-born individuals who married in Cape Town were most likely to be from the same place according to the marriage records: 64% of marriages made after arriving in Cape Town were endogamous.
Figure 2 compares the occupation groups of white women born in South Africa with those born elsewhere, and Figure 3 does this for white men. While foreign-born women show very different employment patterns to South African-born women, the men’s employment patterns seem remarkably similar. Sales and service work, which includes clerks, typists and sales assistants, was the most common occupation for both sets of women. Production work seems to have been something that foreign-born women did not initially do. This could mean that the labour of foreign-born women was sought after at the beginning of the period but declined towards the end of the period. This matches the period when there were no longer fewer women in Cape Town than there were men. To put it differently, while foreign-born women’s labour was initially preferred in the professional sector, this changed over time, as the sex ratio in the city changed. The Government’s Labour Bureau provided help particularly to European women seeking employment and employers seeking women European immigrants. An advertisement read: ‘Employers having vacancies of any kind for European Women, on making application to the Hon. Sec. South African Immigration Association, Colonial Secretary’s Office will receive immediate attention’.41 In certain occupations, such as dressmaking, foreign-born women were in demand because they were ‘from the continent’ and aware of the latest trends.
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FIGURE 2: Comparing immigrant and South African-born women’s occupational groups, 1940–1960. |
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FIGURE 3: Comparing immigrant and South African-born white men’s occupational groups, 1940–1960. |
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The type of work women did had a greater effect on women’s age at first marriage than their birthplace, and the difference was more pronounced for foreign-born women. Störmer et al. found that in the Netherlands by the end of the 19th-century, migrating individuals had a higher age at marriage than non-migrating individuals did.42 They did not include international migrants. This might help explain why white foreign-born women were the least likely to work in production, as shown in Figure 2. Marriage could provide an opportunity to exit the workforce, and a younger age at marriage for a specific sector could indicate a desire to leave that kind of job.
Male production workers, the lowest skill group, had a lower age at first marriage regardless of who they married. Those who married endogamously (their prospective wife having the same birth country) had the highest age at first marriage regardless of their occupation, while South African men marrying foreign-born women had the lowest age at first marriage regardless of their occupation.
The household survey provides the income of individuals within households. The influence of foreign-born women seems to persist. Table 5 shows that households with a foreign-born wife and South African-born husband had the highest household income. This could mean that South African-born men with the highest incomes chose to marry foreign women. We wondered whether one reason these households had higher incomes was that foreign-born women continued working after they were married and could contribute to household income, but we found this was not the case. Foreign-born women were more likely to continue working once married, except when they were married to a South African. Having a foreign-born husband was far more likely to result in a woman continuing to work after marriage, which confirms findings by Rommelspacher showing that foreign-born men introduced cultures and practices that could improve women’s rights in the city.43
| TABLE 5: Share of marriages and income, working wife. |
Conclusion
Our preliminary research into immigrants and marriage in Cape Town reveals the intersection of migration, work and institutions in the city for the period of 1930 to 1970 in the context of a white female deficit until the mid 20th-century. An unexpected finding from this research is that most immigrants did not marry in the Anglican Church. Although civil marriage records did not provide nationalities or birth places, the household survey shows that by 1938–1939, 40% of foreign-born couples married before coming to the city. One conclusion we can draw from those who did marry in the Anglican church is that occupation type seems to have affected immigrant women more than it did immigrant men when it came to marriage. Immigrant women who worked as professionals married later. These immigrant women seem to have been better educated and possibly more valued in the labour market than South African-born women. This could be because of the context of a historical shortage of white women and because immigrant women who worked in the professional sector (in better-paid jobs) would delay marriage. It is also clear that at the beginning of the period, immigrant women were more likely than South African-born women to work as professionals. However, because we do not know when these women came to South Africa, it is hard to know whether they arrived in South Africa having attained a high educational level in their country of origin that allowed them to achieve certain positions or whether there were other factors at play.
It could be that the historical context of a shortage of marriageable white women in Cape Town at the beginning of the 20th-century increased the demand for foreign-born white women later in the century, even though there was no longer an actual shortage by that stage. The household survey also seems to suggest that households with a foreign-born head had a higher income than those with a South African-born head and that foreign-born women who married South African men lived in households with the highest average monthly income in the city.
The enduring impact of a historical female deficit is evident in the marriage patterns we observed among immigrants and locals alike. While the shortage of white women initially spurred the migration of women to the Cape Colony, the legacy of this demographic imbalance persisted, influencing marriage choices and socio-economic outcomes well into the 20th-century.
Acknowledgements
We thank LEAP (the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past), Stellenbosch and the Dutch Reformed Church Archives, Stellenbosch, for making it possible for us to attend the European Society of Historical Demography conference in Radboud in August 2023 where we first presented this work.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.
Authors’ contributions
A.F.R. contributed to conceptualisation, methodology and writing of the original draft. J.F. contributed to formal analysis, data curation and funding acquisition.
Ethical considerations
Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the Stellenbosch University Research Ethics Committee Human Research (Humanities) on 08 April 2019. The ethical clearance number is 8424.
Funding information
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Data availability
The authors declare that all data that support this research article and findings are available in this article and its references.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are the product of professional research. It does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency or that of the publisher. The authors are responsible for this article’s results, findings and content.
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Footnotes
1. B. Bradbury, “Colonial Comparisons: Rethinking Marriage, Civilization and Nation in Nineteenth-Century White Settler Societies,” in Rediscovering the British World, ed. P. Buckner and R. D. Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 135.
2. H. Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Patterns of Colonial America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1945): 113–153.
3. D. T. Courtwright. Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2–3.
4. Bradbury, “Colonial Comparisons,” 135.
5. C. Brettell, “Marriage and Migration,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (2017): 81–97.
6. M. Das Gupta, W. Chung, and L. Shuzhuo, “Evidence for an Incipient Decline in Numbers of Missing Girls in China and India,” Population and Development Review 35, no. 2 (2009): 401–406.
7. Brettell, “Marriage and Migration,” 81–97.
8. V. Bickford-Smith, E. Van Heyningen, and N. Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 25.
9. Bickford-Smith et al., Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, 25.
10. A. Y. Ebenstein and E. J. Sharygin, “The Consequences of the ‘Missing Girls’ of China,” The World Bank Economic Review 23, no. 3, (2009): 399–425.
11. H. Ritchie and M. Roser, “Gender Ration: How Does the Number of Men and Women Differ Between Countries? And Why?”, Our World in Data, February, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio
12. South African Government, Union Statistics for Fifty Years (Pretoria: South African Government, 1960).
13. South African Government, Union Statistics for Fifty Years (Pretoria: South African Government, 1960), A–3-A–4.
14. A. Rommelspacher, “Buying agency? Antenuptial Contracts, Marriage, Property and Female Agency in Cape Town, 1924–1961,” in Women and Family Property, ed. B. Moring (Abingdon: Routledge; 2024), 115–140.
15. A. Perry, “‘Oh I’m Just Sick of the Faces of Men’ Gender Imbalances, Race, Sexuality, and Sociability in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia,” BC Studies, Women’s History and Gender Studies no. 105 (1995), 27–44.
16. J. Cilliers. “Cape Colony Marriage in Perspective” (Masters, Stellenbosch University, 2013).
17. South African Government, 1936 Union Census, Volume II, Ages (Government Printer, 1943), 48. Own calculations from:
18. The country was known as the Union of South Africa from 1910 to 1961.
19. Cape Times, 14 August 1911, 6.
20. E. Bradlow, “Immigration into the Union 1910–1948: Policies and Attitudes”, Vol. 1. (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1978), xii.
21. Cape Times, 08 February 1912, 9.
22. Cape Times, 10 December 1913, 7.
23. M. Dribe, B. Eriksson and F. Scalone, “Migration, Marriage and Social Mobility: Women in Sweden 1880–1900,” Explorations in Economic History 71 (2019): 93.
24. R. Mendelsohn, Sammy Marks: ‘The Uncrowned King of the Transvaal’ (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991).
25. U. Dhupelia-Mesthrie. “Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s.” South African Historical Journal 66, no. 3 (2014): 635–655.
26. J. Fourie and A. Rommelspacher, “Marriage in the Mother City: The Anglican Marriage Records of Cape Town, 1865–1960,” New Contree 87 (2021): 122–141.
27. South African Government, 1936 Union Census, Religions (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1941).
28. In this paper, we use the socially constructed racial terms ‘coloured’ and ‘white’, and ‘black’, as used during the period covered. We do not condone these terms and acknowledge that they are contentious and fluid. In particular, the term ‘coloured’ has derogatory connotations in some parts of the world, but in South Africa, it is the widely accepted name for people of mixed racial and cultural heritage.
29. South African Government, 1946 Union Census, Population (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1936).
30. South African Government, Union Census of South Africa, Population (1943).
31. Cape Times, 20 August 1910, 11.
32. Noting the strained relationship between the English- and Afrikaans-speaking communities in Cape Town, Bickford-Smith et al. say: ‘There was a spatial dimension to the social distance and tension between many Afrikaans-speaking, DRC-attending Capetonians and their English-speaking fellow citizens’.
33. Batson Collection, Ms, 451, Manuscripts Section, Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service. Diverse Items Including Field Book, Specimens in Newspaper Envelopes, Visitor’s Cards. (Card 1059 2/2).
34. “Divorce: Phelan v. Phelan”, Cape Times, 05 February 1910, 8.
35. Cape Times, 29 March 1905, 7.
36. Batson Collection (Card, 1527)
37. “Curious Nullity Case”, Cape Times, 17 March 1905, 7.
38. Cape Times, 13 June 1900, 6.
39. Cape Times, 28 June 1900, 2.
40. J. Fourie and K. I. Inwood, “Interracial Marriages in Twentieth-Century Cape Town: Evidence from Anglican Marriage Records,” The History of the Family 24, no. 3 (2019): 629–652.
41. Cape Times, 20 September 1906, 8.
42. C. Störmer, C. Gellatly, A. Boele, and T. De Moor, “Long-Term Trends in Marriage Timing and the Impact of Migration, the Netherlands (1650–1899),” Historical Life Course Studies 6 (2017): 40–68.
43. Rommelspacher, “Buying Agency?,” 115–140.
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