ABSTRACT
The South African constitutional project generates profound possibilities. The constitutional text is truly expansive, incorporating a range of the standard civil and political rights found in many constitutions. But the Constitution also incorporates a range of social, economic, and cultural rights. Critical to this analysis are provisions of South Africa's Constitution and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court pertaining to women's rights. Other socioeconomic sections of the Constitution, which deal with housing, health care, food, water, and social security, limit the state's duty to provide access to a particular socio-economic right by requiring the state only to take reasonable measures to assure access "within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization" of the right. In addition, the promises of a substantive equality so forcefully articulated by the Court needs to be internalized in relationships and interactions between men and women in the family, workplace, and elsewhere.
