Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority

6. Political Parties, Quotas, and Representation in the New Democracy

Frene Ginwala’s stirring words, uttered as she stepped down from leading the Women’s National Coalition to take up her position as the Speaker in South Africa’s first democratic Parliament, captured the optimistic mood of that phenomenal moment in the country’s transition to democracy. For Ginwala, as for the many other women activists who moved from civil society into the state, entering Parliament was not a break with the women’s movement but a continuation of women’s struggles to break into a maledominated domain. Ginwala’s speech, however, promised more than continuity—she also promised to retain accountability to women, to act politically as a woman, and to refuse marginalization or dominance by political interests hostile to women’s demands. As could be expected, the inception of democracy in 1994 once again reshaped the terms under which women engaged in politics in South Africa. As in other new democracies, women’s organizations turned to electoral strategies to achieve at least some of their goals.1 The attention to political 170 Chapter 6 Political Parties, Quotas, and Representation in the New Democracy Let us . . . say: I am woman; my concerns, my problems, my difficulties, my achievements are an integral part of our new society. No-one will succeed in marginalizing them or me. I am woman, I am South African, I am me. I go to Parliament but I am woman. Frene Ginwala, comments upon leaving the Women’s National Coalition parties and electoral politics shifted the emphasis of women activists from the cross-party alliance-based approach of the transitional era to intraparty activity as the parties competed for voters. Although the value of women’s cross-party mobilization, as expressed in the Women’s National Coalition, continued to be asserted, the impetus and momentum provided by the drafting of the Women’s Charter and by the constitutional debates was no longer present. The coalition leaders shifted their concern to the intraparty imperatives of ensuring that party platforms recognized gender and that women were represented on party lists in the proportional representation system. If the period from 1991 to 1994, which I discussed in chapter 5, can be characterized as an unfolding of interest-based women’s politics, after 1994 we see a shift to electoral and bureaucratic politics. This has been a common pattern in postauthoritarian transitions and opened new sets of issues for South African feminists, as it did in other contexts. As Jacquette and Wolchik have shown, in Latin American countries “the return to democratic politics created unexpected problems for the women’s movements and for social movements in general. The politics of the transition had been intense, with a strong emphasis on rhetoric and mass mobilization. Democracy meant that brave concepts had to be turned into workable legislation , that sustained organizational effort would be needed to ensure that women’s issues would be taken up by the political parties, and that legislation would be implemented and monitored.”2 Comparative literature suggests that all too often the shift from opposition to engaging the state from within is accompanied by the jettisoning of earlier concerns with the achievement of substantive equality.3 In this and the next chapter I explore the extent to which South African women activists succeeded in ensuring that the demands made in the Women’s Charter for Effective Equality and those represented in a range of political documents in the 1980s and early 1990s were articulated through state institutions. In this chapter I explore how women’s organizations and the leadership of the women’s movement sought to insert themselves and their concerns into electoral politics and what the implications of this engagement were for retaining the relatively autonomous voice of women vis-à-vis political parties . I also examine the debates about the representation of women as a constituency in the new democracy and explore the extent to which political parties were open to the presence and interests of women members. Women’s organizations’ demands for greater participation and representation in liberation movements, political parties, and politics in general came into sharp relief with the advent of representative democracy. As I showed in chapter 4, women activists were suspicious of the notion that the Political Parties, Quotas, and Representation 171 formal right to vote would necessarily lead to better policy outcomes for women. Formal membership in political parties and liberation movements had not increased women’s political power...