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

Preface

This book is based on archival research, secondary sources, interviews, and participant-observation. It contributes to existing scholarship on both social movements and gender in South Africa by developing a narrative about the trajectory of women’s politics within the national liberation movement in the last two decades of the twentieth century. To do this I have brought together scattered and somewhat parochial reports, articles, and testimonies from the pages of alternative media such as Speak, Work in Progress, and Agenda. I am indebted to the reporting done by the Speak collective, especially Shamim Meer and Karen Hurt, who were committed to letting women speak their own words. Their work over many years has created an invaluable archive that has preserved women’s voices, both individual and organizational, for future scholars to use. Without this magazine’s short reports on organizations and their activities, and its interviews with politically active women at the local level, researchers would have great difficulty reconstructing the tenor of gender politics in the 1980s. ix Preface Few scholarly studies of women’s organizations cover the gender politics of the 1980s and 1990s in South Africa. Pingla Udit’s dissertation is a notable exception, although she did not benefit from access to archives and she was studying a different period. Articles by Gay Seidman1 and Sheila Meintjes2 provide useful but brief overviews of the period. In addition, I benefited from perceptive articles by four astute participant-observers: Leila Patel on the Federation of South African Women,3 Gertrude Fester on the United Women’s Organisation in the Western Cape (UWO),4 Nozizwe Routledge-Madlala on the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW),5 and Sheila Meintjes6 on UWO and NOW. In my effort to gain deeper insight into the women’s organizations discussed in chapter 2, I was fortunate to be able to consult a range of archives, several of which were not available to researchers before South Africa adopted democracy in 1994. However, the records were not all in good order or condition, and this limited the extent to which I could offer documentary evidence of particular events and decisions . The standard of record keeping reflected the repressive conditions of the 1980s. The archives of the UWO are meticulous for the first five years. Thereafter the states of emergency and the general disruption of the organization resulted in irregular record keeping, and then a fire in the office in 1986 destroyed some records. Compared to UWO’s, the archives of NOW and the Federation of Transvaal Women (FEDTRAW) are thin. NOW did not keep proper records because its leaders considered this a security risk, particularly as police continually raided the office and confiscated minutes and financial records. The last NOW executive had lost track of the few remaining documents, but these were eventually tracked down to the Killie Campbell Library in Durban. Record keeping in women’s organizations was also dependent on the extent of middle-class participation. In UWO in particular, the efforts of the historian Anne Mager, who served as secretary, had a tremendous effect on the archives, as all the records were relatively well ordered and she preserved even small scraps of original notes. In addition , my own notes and record of participation in NOW, the United Democratic Front (UDF), and the Women’s Charter Alliance of Southern Natal were invaluable in reconstructing events and analyzing particular incidents. The South African Historical Archives (SAHA) are located at the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand. There I had access to the extensive UDF Papers, the FEDTRAW Papers, and the collected papers of Helen Joseph. At the University of Cape Town I was able to consult the newly archived papers of Ray Alexander (Simons), which contained many reports sent by underground activists in the women’s movement and Simons ’s own notes and assessments of developments based on secret meetings . She also kept her own copies, with commentaries, of documents and x Preface notes from the Women’s Section of the African National Congress (ANC). Her papers, as well as the private notes and papers of Jacklyn Cock, a member of the ANC’s Emancipation Commission, and Sheila Meintjes, a member of the Strategising Group of the ANC Women’s League, helped me to fill in the gaps in the official archives of the ANC, which are stored at the Mayibuye Centre at...