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

8. Autonomy, Engagement, and Democratic Consolidation

In this book I have sought to engage the broader theoretical debates about the relationship between feminism and nationalism through the lens of a detailed historiography of the South African women’s movement. Rejecting the Manichean choice of characterizing women’s organization in South Africa as either an instrument for nationalist mobilization (and consequently women’s subordination) or a vehicle for feminist politics (and consequently the heroic upholder of women’s autonomy), I have sought to trace the dynamics of the relationship between women and nationalism through a careful tracking of historical events. In many cases women’s organizations did not find it possible to choose one or the other definition of their role but rather sought to uphold both the importance of race and class oppression in shaping gender oppression and the distinctiveness of gender oppression from that of race and class. Even where they grappled with the difficulties of pursuing both aims, women’s organizations were constrained, by the political contexts in which they were located, in their 246 Chapter 8 Autonomy, Engagement, and Democratic Consolidation ability to represent women and facilitate women’s articulation of needs and interests in their own terms. These contexts, to reiterate the argument that I made in chapter 1, were determined not simply by the structures of political opportunity but also by the universe of political discourse, that is, by what was “allowed”within the ideological paradigms of dominant political movements. In building a narrative of women’s political organization and mobilization during the crucial historical period of 1980–99, the book also makes a unique contribution to South African scholarship on the national liberation struggle and on gender historiography. This contribution is more than the addition of the “women’s contribution” to the struggle, although in itself such a study has considerable merit in a field that remains dominated by male-centered analyses of resistance politics. A more ambitious emphasis of this study is the ways in which dominant conceptions of liberation in South Africa have been constrained by their failure to engage with the profound cultural demands of the women’s movement, the limits of democratic participation within nationalist movements, and the inherent (and perhaps inescapable) tension between autonomy and engagement that social movements of subordinate groups face when seeking to impose their demands on broader progressive politics. Autonomy and Engagement: A Fine Balancing Act In the first part of the book I sought to show how feminist activists won leverage within the nationalist movement both internally and in exile. I have drawn attention to the slowness of the process in the exiled movement, pointing out how attempts to develop autonomy were always circumscribed by the location of women’s structures within the ANC. Members of the Women’s Section of the ANC found themselves dislodged from their conventional roles as caretakers and social workers for the movement as young women cadres sought to articulate new roles within the movement. Young women challenged the women’s leadership within the ANC, arguing for a shift from the role of women’s auxiliary to a women’s organization. Their participation in the movement’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, accorded a fragile legitimacy to their demands, which opened the door to extensive debates about autonomy within the movement. The affiliations of the ANC Women’s Section to international socialist women’s movements and to the emerging discourses of gender in the West also opened up new ways of thinking about women’s political roles. Most significant was that the ability of internal women’s organizations to sustain separate organizations Autonomy, Engagement, and Democratic Consolidation 247 and oppose marginalization imposed a political imperative on the exiled women activists to move apace within the ANC. During the 1980s women activists developed more assertive political strategies to deal with male resistance to women’s power within the movement and had considerable success in laying the groundwork for the ANC to court women as a constituency during the transitional period and in the new democracy—most notably, the ANC committed itself formally to including gender equality as one of the goals of national liberation. However, even the formal rhetoric did not adequately address women’s demands; documents such as the Constitutional Guidelines made generalized references to gender equality but avoided considering the ways in which gender shaped all aspects of social life and, most particularly, women’s (lack of) power...