Situating Women’s Studies at the
University of the Western Cape: The National and International Context
By Rhoda Kadalie
Introduction
When I returned from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague at the end of 1986 with a Women's Studies degree, and eight months pregnant, I was approached by the organisers of the University of Cape Town Summer School to present a week long series of lectures entitled "Contemporary Debates in Feminism". Regardless of the imminence of my confinement, they pressurised me to do it, promising to provide me with as much support as they could. The reason given for the urgency was that in the aftermath of the 1985-1986 uprising in the country, South Africa was ripe for feminism, and the Summer School would be the most appropriate vehicle through which public awareness could be raised about the position of women in South Africa. They felt that my recently acquired degree, a rarity in the country at the time, would equip me well to do the job. Since I was one of two people with formal qualifications in Women's Studies, they left me with no option but to yield to their demand. Soon after having given birth, with engorged breasts and post-natal fatigue, I presented a week long course on the following topics;
* Definitions of Feminism and the Crisis in International Feminism;
* Liberal and Radical Feminism;
* Marxist and Socialist Feminism;
* Black Feminism: Western versus Third World Feminism;
* Women's Liberation and National Liberation.
The participants registered for the course ranged from interested mavericks to some of Cape Town's foremost feminists from various women's organisations. Besides the impact and excitement that the course generated, lesbian women came out of the closet stating that my lectures were the first of its kind in Cape Town and that I was the first black 'straight' woman to have opened up debates around lesbian sexuality in public. The reaction from black activist women was equally interesting as they now had moved away considerably from the old position that feminism was divisive and secondary to the liberation struggle, going on to openly criticising the sexism of comrades within the liberation movement. Needless to say the Summer School was significant in that topics which were formerly regarded as taboo and too sensitive were now opened up for debate and contestation.
After six months maternity leave, and after an absence of two years in total overseas, I returned to the University of the Western Cape, which I am pleased to say, was ripe and ready for feminism.
Initiatives Taken at the University of Western Cape to Address Discrimination Against Women
Since the mid-198O's women at the University of Western Cape (UWC) began to challenge the status quo with regards to gender-related conditions of service on the campus. Several meetings were held by female staff to ascertain how women were experiencing discrimination in the various sectors of employment and to explore ways of dealing with problems raised by women.
In 1987 the Rector called on university women to form a Women's Commission (WC), representative of all the various constituencies on campus, to make recommendations concerning gender-related conditions of service, and to address in particular the position of women employees at UWC. The WC was formally constituted in 1987, and it immediately proceeded to draft a document listing all the blatantly sexist employment practices at UWC. This document was presented to the Human Resources Committee (HRC) to alert them to the fact that we were beginning to raise concrete issues in the hope of finding solutions to them.
Within two years, through intense negotiations with the management of the university, we managed to obtain maternity benefits, a housing subsidy for all women regardless of marital status and a preschool for children of staff members. In 1991 the WC organised a campus-wide meeting in response to requests from women to talk about the more subtle forms of discrimination women were experiencing with regards to promotion, staff development, job interviews, conditions of leave, and so on. From the discussion it became clear that there was a desperate need to develop formal affirmative action mechanisms, which would more adequately address all the issues raised by women.
A distinctive characteristic of the 1980's was that UWC openly aligned itself with the broad democratic movement, and as such many students involved in national and local politics, and in women's groups, expressed their desire to receive training in women's studies. Simultaneously, younger academics returning from overseas study, having received formal training in aspects of women and gender studies, started discussion about the possibility of starting up and coordinating women's studies programmes, courses, and research projects, and to find effective ways of raising gender issues in the context of the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic South Africa. The Women's Studies Group (WSG), consisting of staff members from the various faculties on campus, was started in 1988 and the following guidelines were drawn up:
* to integrate gender and women's issues into teaching programmes, courses and research projects;
* to make resources and information on women and gender accessible to the university community;
* to engage in debates and discussion on theoretical work that has contributed to our understanding of gender and women's issues, and to make theoretical work accessible to people outside academia;
* to organise public lecture series on campus to heighten gender awareness;
* to set up an advice centre for counselling women;
* to establish links with existing political women's organisations.
The Women's Studies Group has been very successful over the years in creating an awareness of gender issues on the campus on an on-going basis. Together with student organisations the WSG held regular public debates on sexual harassment, rape, abortion, and women's rights to draw the broader campus community into debates around these issues. Joint programmes were organised to commemorate International Women's Day on the 8th of March, and South African Women's Day on the 9th of August, to highlight aspects of women's oppression and history as being part and parcel of the struggle for transformation in South Africa. In 1990 the WSG started discussions around how to infuse an awareness of women and gender into disciplines across the various faculties, in addition to developing a post-graduate curriculum in women's studies. Incidentally, UWC was approached by both the University of Missouri and the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht to start an exchange programme in the field of women's studies. Co-operation with these two universities gave shape to our conceptions of an appropriate course for UWC and the materials and books donated from these institutions started the ball rolling in a more formal way.
In 1991, two senior women staff members of the Senate Academic Planning Committee, in response to a document drafted by the Dean on Research development at UWC, challenged the committee to include more women into the decision-making structures of the university, to develop curricula in women studies, and to enshrine their commitment to gender equity in a gender policy and a non-sexist language policy for UWC. To cut a long story short, in 1993 a Gender Equity Unit, funded by the Ford Foundation, was established to formalise and centralise all the activities around women and gender. The newly appointed Gender Equity Officer was appointed to develop:
1. a statistical analysis of the workforce at UWC;
2. an analysis of the position of women on campus in all aspects of university life: e.g., the decision-making structures, appointments, promotions, research and teaching.
3. a longitudinal study to access of women students to, and achievements in university programmes;
4. the formulation of policies and procedures relating to the social conditions of women, in particular violence and sexual harassment; childcare facilities and employment conditions;
5. the development of curriculum on women and gender at undergraduate and post-graduate level;
6. ongoing research on all of the above;
7. regular reporting to Senate and Council on the position of women at the university.
In the second semester of 1993, the Gender Equity Officer, together with interested members of the academic staff developed a post-graduate women and gender studies programme. Unlike the Women's Studies programme at the University of Natal, which concentrates predominantly on literary and psychological aspects of gender, UWC's programme covers a broad range of interests across a number of faculties and departments designed to meet the research interests and needs of both students and staff.
The University of Western Cape, with its distinctive political ethos and history of non-racialism, is well-placed to render expertise in a coherent, focussed post-graduate programme, and thus develop within the university an area of concentration on women and gender. The demand for training in these fields has increased substantially over the years, with the implementation of affirmative action in academia, non-government, and corporate institutions throughout the country. Also in terms of development, the focus on women and the improvement of their lives, especially in developing, countries, has become the target of the development programmes and agencies throughout the third world. Therefore, our postgraduate programme, at both Honours and Masters level has a strong sociological and development thrust as is evident in the design of the programme.
While women's studies has taken on the character of a discipline and has claimed its place in curricula of universities in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, the same does not hold for universities in South Africa. While in the USA women studies programmes have grown from two programmes in 1970, to over 2000 programmes on over 500 campuses, presently in South Africa there is only one university offering a formal undergraduate and post-graduate programme, namely the University of Natal[1]. This is despite the fact that we have a proud history of women's struggles in South Africa, and despite the existence of a broad range of national political women's organisations all over the country, and despite the impact women have made in the negotiations process on the interim constitution.
Women's studies began with what now seems a simple recognition: that women have been left out of scholarship and decision-making structures throughout the world. Traditionally, research and course contents at universities have often failed to explore objectively the existence of, and reasons for, unequal gender relations in society; the embeddedness of patriarchy and male domination within the dominant power structures of society; or why the status of women across the world has been secondary to that of men; and how this legacy of devaluation has formed the historical background for discriminatory practice and negative attitudes towards women all over the world. Initially women's studies sought not only to reform curricula and disciplines through its emphasis on interdisciplinary research on women and gender, but it also aimed to develop affirmative action programmes for women, who not only make up half of the world's population, but also half of the student population, about 1/5 of faculty and staff, all secretaries, most librarians and administrative staff. As such, women form a powerful basis for change, and universities provide a challenging context for feminist social engineering to take place.
There has never been a comfortable relationship between feminism and women's studies. In fact "feminist scholarship" according to Lowe and Benson: "is regarded by many non-feminists as lacking in rigour, as tainted by politics, or simply as special pleading." (1991:53) Is feminist scholarship special pleading? In most universities in the USA, and to some extent at the University of the Western Cape it was special pleading in the sense that its affinity with the women's movement of the 1960's and in South Africa, with the national liberation movement, was still very strong. As such, feminist scholarship or women's studies is regarded as one of the many avenues for social change. UWC's women's studies postgraduate programme was shaped very much, as I have tried to show, around this ethos, with special emphasis on the developmental, social and the sociological. The legacy of apartheid, having left us with extreme levels of poverty and underdevelopment of which women and children are the main victims, has almost made it inevitable for us to have this focus. Women in the liberation movement have produced a rich body of scholarship theorising around the effects of apartheid on women; on women and human rights; on women and constitutional rights and customary law; on reproductive rights versus government population planning programmes, and so forth. As valuable as these documents might be, what is needed now is to move from 'woman as victim' to 'woman as empowered citizen' and this necessitates a shift in feminist scholarship.
Therefore, as we endeavour to move from margins to the mainstream or academia by securing administrative independence, a separate budget, tenurable appointments, and cross-accreditation of women's studies courses across various disciplines and departments, we need to reconceptualise women's studies not only as a political and social tool for change, but also as an intellectual activity contributing to the construction of new knowledges. Susan Sheridan emphasises the point aptly in her redefinition of women's studies:
“Women's Studies is at its strongest points an attack on androcentric knowledge and practices, and the production of new analyses of the position and activities of women which extend to whole social formations. As such it has the potential to redraw the map of knowledges; it is more than a corrective, more than a supplement to received truths.” (Sheridan 1991:66)
As such women's studies has departed from its initial ambition to be a discipline in its own right. It should be regarded as a field of study borrowing from various disciplines in order to reconceptualise knowledge by drawing on and transcending
“…a range of specific disciplines in order to investigate issues and questions that derive, not from these disciplines, but from the women's movement. It is 'trandisciplinary' in that it moves, not between disciplines, but beyond them.” (Sheridan 1991:69)
Futhermore, says Sheridan, women's studies is an attempt to incorporate a critique of the disciplines as well as the construction of new knowledges. "This construction is interdisciplinary in that it operates characteristically in the spaces between disciplines and traditions or thought and our cultural positioning in terms of class, race, gender". (1991: 70-71)
Feminist analysis, especially in its, post-structuralist, postmodern mode is "forged out of debate with received knowledge, as well as out of political activism" (Sheridan 1991:70). As such it is one of the most dialectical fields of knowledge which is capable of keeping the debate between feminist activism, and the construction of knowledge alive as in no other discipline.
Women's studies refuses to succumb to the straight-jacket of a discipline. This is the, challenge for us at UWC, and I wish to suggest that the relationship with Utrecht Women's studies with their strong emphasis on postmodernism will keep this vision alive.
Lowe, M. and Benston, M.L. 1991 "The Uneasy Alliance of Feminism and Academia." in: A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. Routledge.
Sheridan, S. 1991 "From Margin to Mainstream" in A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. Routledge.
[1] Since the writing of this article, the situation has changed considerably, please refer to http://www.gwsafrica.org/directory/index.html for an up to date status.