Immoral Habits: Delinquent White Girls in 1920s Cape Town and the Distribution of Blame

In much recent historical writing on the history of South African child welfare considerable emphasis has been placed on the poor white problem. The development of child welfare is typically seen as part of the wider project to uplift so-called 'poor whites'. This article builds on this literature by focusing on one particular aspect of South African child welfare work - the attempt to discipline 'uncontrollable' youth. Case histories pertaining to out-of-control young people, I argue, reveal the intensity of the public antipathy towards adolescent female sexuality. This was not only a problem of 'miscegenation' or interracial sex. Case histories show how evidence of female sexuality was constructed in the day-to-day - by child welfare agents, state officials, community members and families themselves. Together, these voices worked to distribute blame. Interested parties drew on prevailing eugenicist ideas around mental weakness and moral aberration but these were filtered through a more impressionistic, common-sense vernacular that described how girls looked, what they wore, how they behaved and who they knew. As often as blame was located with bad mothers and bad homes, it was also directed at girls themselves, leading in many cases to long-term institutional confinement.