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

7. One Woman, One Desk, One Typist: Moving into the Bureaucracy

As I showed in chapter 6, among the far-reaching changes wrought by the establishment of democracy was the shift of women’s organizations from an oppositional relationship to the state to an approach that treated the state as both permeable to women’s interests and influence and, consequently , a desirable locus for gender activism. This chapter examines this shift in strategy and the political assumptions and expectations that underpinned it as they relate to the creation of a national gender machinery and to the implementation of gender equality commitments in policies and service delivery. I describe in some detail the formal enabling conditions that have supported the idea that the South African state is open to the participation of women and that have provided the new framework for interventions and relationships with to the state by women’s organizations. These 210 Chapter 7 One Woman, One Desk, One Typist Moving into the Bureaucracy No government or bureaucracy feels it has anything to fear from women. In civil society they rarely represent a tightly mobilized constituency, at the domestic level their interests are often closely bound in with those of men in the family and in politics and public administration they are under-represented and have rarely acted in distinctively feminist ways. . . . As a result, far from having anything to fear from women, many governments can make important political gains at the international and domestic levels by espousing gender equity, without serious risk of being held accountable—of having to operationalize the promises made in top-level rhetoric. Anne Marie Goetz, “The Politics of Integrating Gender to State Development Processes” include the constitutional provisions for gender equality, the creation of institutional frameworks to address gender inequalities (the national machinery for women), and policies and programs advanced in the first five years of democracy. In effect, these provisions instituted a “gender pact” in South Africa to the extent that they incorporated women as an interest group into the policy-making process. A number of critical questions frame these descriptions. What are the new terrains of engagement between the state and civil society around gender inequalities in South Africa, and what has been the effect of institutionalization on the relative ability of women’s organizations, and particularly feminist activists within both state and civil society, to mobilize around broad political demands? The representative sphere discussed in chapter 5 constitutes only one arena of women’s engagement with the state. This chapter focuses more closely on the bureaucracy and the policy arena. As Anne Phillips has pointed out, increasing the number of women elected to Parliament does not necessarily increase the representation of women’s interests. She points out that “it is only when there are mechanisms through which women can formulate their own policies or interests that we can really talk of their ‘representation.’”1 This would suggest that the task facing feminists was not simply to increase women’s representation in the state (numerically and qualitatively), even though this was a priority.2 Feminist analysis also needs to uncover the hidden ways in which institutions, as well as state policies (and counterpolicies advocated by women’s organizations), constitute the particular interests of different groups of women. Institutions (even the national machineries) are not neutral vessels through which interests are expressed. How women are constituted as a group, and which women within this group are positioned as claimants for services, goods, and the like is a matter of political debate. As Nancy Fraser has pointed out, “Needs talk functions as a medium for the making and contesting of political claims: it is an idiom in which political conflict is played out and through which inequalities are symbolically elaborated and challenged.”3 I explore these questions through a case study of one of the first major processes of social policy reform, the overhaul of welfare for poor children. Through this example I examine how women’s different interests have been constituted by both social policy and women’s organizations in the changed political environment and the extent to which representation in either the bureaucratic or the representational sphere has advanced women’s struggles for substantive equality. This case study allows me to explore differences (of class, race, and political power) between women as well as between women and men. It also poses a fundamental conundrum for One Woman, One Desk, One Typist 211 those wishing to implement socioeconomic rights...