The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. "A World of Their Own" is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past.

Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students' experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women's social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education--introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

This book examines the African home as a key site of struggle in the making of modern KwaZulu-Natal, a South African province that instantiates in extreme form many of the transformations that shaped the colonial world. The book's essays explore major themes in African and global history, including the colonial manipulation of kinship and the exploitation of labor, modernist practices of social engineering, and the changes wrought within intimate relationships by post-industrial decline. Ranging from the rural to the urban and the pre-colonial era to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, the book emphasizes the affective and ideological dimensions of ekhaya (home). With the President's homestead upgrade expenses under scrutiny after Public Protector Thuli Madonsela released her report, it is clear that the politics of 'home' plays an important role in South Africa's current affairs. However, this is not a new phenomenon. The book offers insight into how the home, which embodies both modernist aspirations and nostalgic longings for the past, has become the touchstone for popular discontent and political activism in recent decades. Just as colonialism in South Africa was a colonialism of the home, politics in South Africa are a politics of the home.