Redefining the Terms: Putting South African Women on Democracy's Agenda

"Freedom cannot be achieved unless the women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression . . . and . . . they have been empowered to intervene in all aspects of life as equals with any other member of society."

—President Nelson Mandela, May 24, 1994

Despite the emergence of democracy movements in all corners of Africa, only a small number of African states are governed now by democratic regimes. At least since the colonial period, African women have mobilized to challenge patriarchal states and societies on behalf of their concerns, yet their efforts have yielded scant fruit (Van Allen 1976). In a few countries, however—Namibia, Uganda, and South Africa—women recently have inserted themselves onto their states' political agendas and established a formidable political presence unprecedented on the continent post-colonially. In the revolt preceding the transition to South Africa's democratic regime, women forged novel analyses of the violence, marginalization, and exploitation fused to their status as "superfluous appendages to male units of labor." Black women activists challenged patriarchal privilege as a system interlocking with systems of white-supremacist and capitalist class power. They articulated an understanding of women as altogether human (contrary to the state's view of them) with co-responsibility in society and asserted a re-vision of the social order, one in which justice entailed an "equitable distribution of social necessities" (Kaplan 1997, 8).

The strategies South African women have used to advance gender democracy during political transition include politicizing gender, constructing and advocating women's interests in the context of mobilization against the apartheid state, and tendering a notion of gender justice that wove claims for social and economic rights with the political and civil entitlements of citizens. As women asserted demands for resources to meet the obligations of womanhood as wives and mothers, as they claimed space within liberation movements to articulate their own experiences of oppression, as they contended with their female counterparts in rival organizations to identify common concerns, and as they affirmed the legitimacy of their political leadership within their own organizations and in "normal politics" of the democratic regime, "The work of women in the battle for liberation, . . . laid the basis for intensified battle over and education about, gender oppression that is being waged by new South African feminists today" (Kemp et al. 1995, 143). Thus in a key transitional moment in South Africa's political history, women refined and expanded the terms of their inclusion in the new democratic order.

As I survey here some of the contours of South Africans' struggles for gender equity and gender justice, I foreground black—meaning African, Indian, and "coloured"—women's activism because their struggles provided the major catalyst for mobilizing broad, multiracial coalitions of women to press for democratization of gender relations. Always aware of the complications of terms and contexts, I assume that "women's interests" are heterogeneous since differences in class, culture, geography, and sexuality situate women variously in structures that facilitate differential access to power and resources. Understanding how activists have begun to transform systems of privilege and oppression in various political settings offers an opportunity as well for using "both ends of the telescope" to sharpen strategies for resisting hierarchical power in other localities and to become more critically aware of our own normative outlooks, conceptual and analytic frameworks, and political landscapes.

Women's Resistance

Women's resistance to South Africa's white settler state dates back to the late nineteenth century, but became most visible and organized in 1940s and 1950s mass boycotts, and again in the mass democratic movement of the 1980s. The latest social uprising, which precipitated the fall of apartheid, was sustained for several years by women's mobilization in rural areas and townships, in military units and civic organizations, in spontaneous boycotts and carefully forged alliances among the regime's opponents (Bernstein 1985, Walker 1990, Cock 1993). From the 1970s women active in...