'... a complex history told with consummate clarity, compassion and poignancy'- A.M.Rafferty, Department of Nursing and Midwifery Studies, Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham This book explores the establishment of nursing as a profession for white, English-speaking 'ladies' in the last third of the nineteenth century, the class and racial tensions that developed as first Afrikaner and then African, Indian and Coloured women were drawn into its ranks, and the way in which processes of professionalisation further divided nurses. The book provides a powerful metaphor for South African society.

'... a complex history told with consummate clarity, compassion and poignancy'- A.M.Rafferty, Department of Nursing and Midwifery Studies, Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham This book explores the establishment of nursing as a profession for white, English-speaking 'ladies' in the last third of the nineteenth century, the class and racial tensions that developed as first Afrikaner and then African, Indian and Coloured women were drawn into its ranks, and the way in which processes of professionalisation further divided nurses. The book provides a powerful metaphor for South African society.

If, for most of the past in most parts of the world, most women have been 'hidden from history', black women in South Africa have been doubly hidden, both as women and because they are black. Three women - two of them black - meet in the pages of this title. Lily Moya was a Transkei schoolgirl growing up in lonely and alien surroundings. She sought help with her education from Mabel Palmer, an elderly white academic, then Organiser of the Natal University College's Non-European section. The third was Subusisiwe Makhanya, a remarkable Zulu woman and a pioneer social worker. Their letters illuminate more of the South African condition than the majority of history textbooks; the generosities, yet humiliations, of white liberalism; the nature of mission education; the socialisation of black girls; and the dilemmas they confront. They also reveal the separate worlds which we all inhabit, but which are made more frightening and more separate by the divisions of age, ethnicity and race.

..". remarkable... " Foreign Affairs

..". illuminates the workings of institutionalized racism through the correspondence of three South African women in the 1940s and 50s." Feminist Bookstore News

"The history of a place and time is made vivid by the combination of the rich personal record of the letters and the theoretically framed analytic discussion. The result is new insight into the history of black education in South Africa, and a revealing study of the dynamics of women s relations under colonialism across the lines of race, age and power." Susan Greenstein, The Women s Review of Books

"A riveting and revealing book one in which few of the characters wear hats that are spotlessly white." Third World Resources

"This rich collection of letters deserves its own reading, as do Shula Marks s bracketing essays. They are invaluable for clarifying the myriad ramifications that the letters raise for African women." International Journal of African Historical Studies

..". powerful and perceptive....speak s] eloquently to a Western audience that is poised to deal with the political and personal lives of South African women in an intimate holistic fashion." Belles Lettres

The roots of modern Apartheid are exposed through the painful and revealing correspondence of three very different South African women two black and one "liberal" white from 1949 to 1951. Although the letters speak for themselves, the editor has written an introduction and epilogue which tell of the tragic ending to this riveting story."