ABSTRACT
Race and class have held pride of place in explaining the specific form and process of the South African political economy. Explanations have ranged from simplistic notions of primordial racial identities and capacities to a richer understanding that race, as well as class, ethnicity and regional identities, has shaped South African politics and society since the advent of settlers in the southern tip of Africa in the seventeenth century. There is a wide and textured historiography for those who wish to understand the history of colonialism, segregation and apartheid in South Africa. Whilst pre-colonial societies, colonial history, the history of industrialization and labour history have been the focus of scholarship, it is significant that gender relations have not received the same close analytical attention from scholars in general. None the less, a small corpus of literature addressing gender relations and women’s struggles does exist, although gender remains a ‘bit on the side’ in most academic disciplines.1 The existing work shows that women have been at the centre of shaping the nature of South African society and its political economy. Belinda Bozzoli (1983) suggested that feminist theoretical concerns would considerably alter our understanding of race and class relations in South Africa. In particular she showed how the concept of patriarchy deployed in a variety of historical and social contexts revealed what she called a ‘patch-work quilt of patriarchies’. She argued that the particularity of gender relations amongst different cultural and ethnic groups determined the different nature and timing of male and female migrancy and proletarianization. She did not take this analysis further to explore the multiple dynamics of women’s social position and political participation. But her analysis pointed to the vital importance of recognizing what has become common-place in the writings of the 1990s, the significance of difference-in terms of class, race and ethnic location-as well as the significance of geographic location, in understanding the nature of South African society and of women’s economic and political status. Since the early 1980s there has been considerable debate amongst women political activists in South Africa involved in the political struggle against apartheid about their positioning in relation to feminism. Some have eschewed any association with the concept, claiming that it is Western in origin, and that, in the context of the South African struggle, it had divisive effects. It divided women from each other, for there were many women who could not identify with the idea of women’s liberation. It also divided men and women from one another. Others have embraced the term, attempting to give it
a meaning germane to the national struggle in which South Africans were engaged. Thus in the 1980s women in the African National Congress Women’s Section fought for recognition of a simultaneous struggle against apartheid oppression and gender oppression as the only way for true national liberation to be achieved. But it is only in the 1990s, since the demise of formal apartheid, that the debate has begun to probe more searchingly the implications of race in the construction of a South African feminist politics. A recent account of women’s organizations in South Africa has suggested that they are part of ‘a women’s movement’ because they reflect the fact that ‘women organize around issues that affect them in ways that challenge patriarchal assumptions’ (Kemp et al. 1995). This suggests a feminist project in intent, a project which presupposes a challenge to the systemic aspects of women’s subordination and oppression. It is true that women from different locations have not been passive bystanders in the making of South African history. Black2 women, and African women in particular, have belligerently asserted their specific needs in the context of state actions curtailing their mobility and opportunities. Less understood, because not explored, are the reasons women have not directed their struggles against the various types of patriarchies which have limited their actions within tradition and customary laws. Rather, women’s struggles have targeted the state. It was against attempts to contain their freedom of movement, and the pass laws in particular, that African women mobilized their oppositional energies at different times. In the 1980s, women’s organizations articulated a new consciousness about the relationship between women’s emancipation and national liberation. The context of national oppression has not easily embraced feminist objectives. But women’s organization and struggles from at least the 1950s did pose a challenge to aspects of patriarchal domination, even if they did not offer an overt feminist agenda. This chapter is an attempt to evaluate the political organization of women in their diverse locations in South Africa in the past and in the present. It attempts, first, to locate the enormous social divisions between women, and how these have been expressed politically over time. In so doing it provides a profile of the divisions between women in the twentieth century, and especially since the Second World War. It then analyses the diverse ways in which nationalist discourses have shaped the manner in which women have organized and been incorporated into political movements. It considers some of the debates amongst women involved in those organizations. The final section focuses on developments in the post-1990 period, during the transition to democracy. In this period a coalition, known as the Women’s National Coalition (WNC), was formed in an attempt to bridge the divisions between women across the ideological, racial and class divides during the crucial years of negotiation between 1991 and 1994. In the conclusion the impact of the WNC on the political and constitutional process is assessed.
