Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: GWS in South Africa

Founding Trajectories and Publications in South African Women's and Gender Studies

Formal academic research involving taught courses and the publication of research in journals was not the first expression of South African research and writing on women and gender. In the late seventies and early eighties, the climate of South African progressive politics was strongly attuned to the need for practical activity and grassroots activism in opposition to apartheid. Many writers and scholars who addressed women's concerns and engaged feminist politics developed their research under the aegis of this populist and grassroots-oriented banner. The period from the seventies to the mid-eighties therefore witnessed a range of activist-oriented research and writing that dealt very directly with black women's experiences of political subordination and economic exploitation. Deborah Gaitskell epitomizes this orientation when she writes that "in trying to support themselves and their children, black women lack access to any meaningful political power, while the government pursues a policy of systematic dispossession and forced population removals which bears most harshly on women, children and the old" (1983:1).

Among the zones where this activist-oriented research was most prominent were the Western Cape, Johannesburg and Natal. The Western Cape exhibited a variety of gender work ranging from university-based research and education to activism within NGOs and grassroots organisations. This work generated diverse publications, including newsletters, research findings from NGOs and papers published through university departments and institutes. Important examples of practical work grew out of Cape Town's Rape Crisis Centre. Since it began in 1976, Rape Crisis provided practical and emotional support for numerous women and their families in and around Cape Town. The organisation focused on four main areas: counselling, education, training, lobbying/advocacy and research. Its key early publication, Consent, provided an important platform for statistical and empirical information as well as analytical and doctrinal commentary on gender oppression and justice.

Other publications produced mainly under an academic rubric also disseminated information about black women's experiences of exploitation and oppression, with much of this writing dealing with, for example, women factory workers, domestic workers and farm workers, or women in informal settlements. For example, at the University of Cape Town, the Department of Economic History, under its South African Research Papers series, published a special issue on housing and women garment workers in the Western Cape (1984).

In Natal, volume 2, number 4 (1975) and volume 6, number 1 (1980) of the South Africa Labour Bulletin, were devoted to the exploitation of women's labour in South Africa. Also at the edges of university activity in Natal, the Institute for Black Research produced numerous publications focusing specifically on women, including Women Without Men (1975) and Factory and Family (1984).

In Johannesburg, research and writing included work located in and beyond the university. Critical Health offered a platform for many postgraduate students and academics from Wits within psychology, medicine and sociology. Contributions frequently dealt with subjects especially relevant to women and gender relations, with no 9, published in 1983, offering a special focus on women and health. The South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED), an independent trust for black education with bases in Johannesburg and Cape Town published, in collaboration with Ravan, Working Women: A Portrait of Africa's Black Women Workers (1985). Intermittent work produced by anti-apartheid and student organisations should also be noted, and includes the Wits Black Students Society's Challenge, with volume 1, number 3 being devoted to National Women's Day, and a magazine like New Era, where volume 1, number 1 (1987) offered a feature article on the national women's movement.

In all three major areas, the South African Institute of Race Relations published work that drew attention to black women's social marginalization, economic exploitation and subjection to extreme forms of violence. Earlier reports (like Domestic Servants: A Microcosm of 'The Race Problem' published in 1975), was succeeded by work that dealt more analytically with women's domestic and wage labour.

Also at a national level, From Women, a publication produced and informally distributed by feminists and groups in the country's major cities from the late seventies, drew together journalism, films, reviews and studies of women's struggles locally and in other third-world contexts. In terms of political orientation and subject-matter, this publication anticipated the objectives of the publication, Speak in later years, when South African women struggling for democratic change sought to focus squarely on gender politics.

Much of the work dealing with women's economic and political subordination in the seventies was concerned with how women were oppressed by capitalism and racialism. The tendency was therefore to record how particular women bore the main brunt of an economically and politically unjust system, rather than to explore why this was the case by unpacking gender dynamics in relation to racialism and capitalism. Commenting on the persistence of this approach well into the eighties, Belinda Bozzoli, in a publication written in 1983, remarks: "This collapsing of female oppression into the capitalist mode of production has been the dominant tendency in analyses of women in South Africa today. It is a tendency which has suited the indigenous left, reluctant as it is to consider the implications of its own internal sexism. It appears to be far more comfortable for the left to absorb feminist struggles, or indeed subordinate them, into the general struggle against capitalism, than to begin to consider the vast implications of admitting the relative autonomy of women's oppression" (1983:142).

The run-up to work on women from the seventies came from two directions. One was an empiricist and largely pre-feminist tradition within the academy. The other was a primarily activist tradition located beyond the academy, although many who worked within this tradition had some form of academic affiliation.

Deborah Gaitskell provides a comprehensive discussion of the ways in which women academics, located especially in the discipline of anthropology between the early 1900s and the sixties, initiated research on women in South African studies to pioneer academic attention to women's roles and life histories. She argues, however, that this work was emphatically pre-feminist, and that the "sexual division in society is seen as relatively unproblematic" (1983:3). According to Gaitskell, scholars like Hansi Pollak, Monica Wilson and Hilda Kuper produced social records that, although largely rectificatory accounts of the diverse aspects of women's lives, helped to place women's studies within the ambit of serious academic discussion in South African studies.

A pre-eminently activist tradition in early research grew out of liberal, philanthropic and anti-apartheid organisations like mission schools and the projects associated with them, the Institute of Race Relations, the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) and the ANC Women's League. This trajectory focused on topical events and was directly concerned with black women's welfare. It is noteworthy that, unlike the situation within the academy, a number of black women contributed to this body of work. These included Lilian Ngoyi, Charlotte Maxeke, Sibusisiwe Makanya, Katie Makanya, Madi-Hall Xuma. Their involvement in a range of educational, political and welfare activities, however, constrained their ability to make significant inroads into writing traditions that were dominated and defined by white South Africans, even though black women were, more often than not, the subjects of investigation.

It was mainly in the eighties that consolidated and systematic research began to develop. This reflected the growing consensus among researchers and activists that gender could not be incidentally woven into other forms of political activism and/or the broader battle against apartheid. It began to be acknowledged that gender had a distinct dynamic, and that it was important to focus on gender politics and justice in spheres ranging from domestic and family life to structures and relations within anti-apartheid movements and trade unions like the United Democratic Front (UDF), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

The growth of women's studies in universities was considerable, and established the academic validity of feminism and studies of women in disciplines, university departments and institutions that had long been gender-blind. On one level, within universities, courses like women in literature, women in history or women and the family began to be taught by feminist educators like Mary Simons, Ginny Volbrecht, Dorothy Driver, Helen Bradford and Anne Levett at the University of Cape Town, Sheila Meintjes and Deborah Posel at Wits, and Cherryl Walker and Michelle Friedman at the University of Natal. In the Transkei, a former Bantustan, the University of Transkei (UNITRA) held out what, for some, was regarded as important opportunities for academic exploration. The university consequently initiated some important courses and networking initiatives around gender and women's studies.

Those whose publications gave direction to specifically feminist study of women in South Africa include Jacklyn Cock, Cherryl Walker, Deborah Gaitskell, Belinda Bozzoli and Dorothy Driver. Intervening in different ways, these scholars initiated path-breaking approaches to gender in the eighties. Their seminal works are therefore worth reviewing in some detail.

Cheryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (1982)
Walker undertook extensive research for this book, which offers a detailed record of black women in politics from the start of the twentieth century to the mid 1900s. The book is a timely response to a moment in South African anti-apartheid struggle often associated only with men's agency and activism. The value of Walker's project also derives from its analysis of the connections between race, class and gender in shaping struggles and consciousness. One of her central arguments is that consciousness among black South African women has been primarily nationalist or race-conscious rather than gender conscious. While the argument has been contested and in some ways qualified by others, it has given shape to many subsequent interpretations of black women's consciousness.

Jacklyn Cock's Maids and Madams (1980)
This book was extremely significant in analysing simultaneously the consciousness and experiences of white and black women, especially within the intimate and fraught domain of the domestic sphere. Much previous work on South African women (and indeed, much work to date) tended to deal either with black or white women, so that Cock's study offered commentary on monolithic ideas about "women's" consciousness or experience in the country. The strength of Cock's study also derives from its explicit analysis of gender politics and dynamics. Cock played a foremost role in refining theoretical models and tools attuned to the interface of race, class and gender in South Africa.

Belinda Bozzoli, Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies (1983)
Bozzoli's article was extremely important in raising awareness about reasons for the absence of significant political and intellectual discussion of gender until the early eighties. She also explored previous traditions of studies of women, focusing on the extent to which this research, falling within a conventional Marxist framework, failed to problematize discussion of gender hierarchies and patriarchy. Bozzoli proposed alternative directions for synthesizing Marxist and feminist theoretical tools, with the second half of her paper identifying three forms of consciousness among South African women: "philanthropy and liberalism amongst the middle classes; socialism in the case of white workers and populist nationalism in the case of blacks" (1983:167). Bozzoli therefore offered a conceptual map, on which subsequent feminist scholars often drew, for analysing consciousness and politics among South African women.

Deborah Gaitskell, "Introduction" to Journal of Southern African Studies" (1983)
Gaitskell's introduction frames a number of seminal studies drawn together in the Journal of South African Studies' path-breaking special issue on gender, and is therefore important in tracing early research trends. Apart from this, the introduction offers a rich survey of scholarship on women during the early and mid-1900s, showing how this work, often originating in anthropology, marked the genesis of scholarship on women's experiences within South African studies. The particular strength of this survey derives from the way that Gaitskell shows how an early rectificatory tradition was rooted in gender-blind paradigms developed by anthropologists like Malinowski, at the same time that she demonstrates its connection to subsequent work attuned to gender politics.

Dorothy Driver, "Woman as Sign in the South African Colonial Enterprise" (1985)
Located in the field of literary studies, Driver develops an interdisciplinary orientation to reading cultural texts in relation to gender and nationalist discourses. Rooting her argument in deconstructive analysis, she explores the construction of roles and identities for white South African women and shows how gender identities are always culturally variable and contingent on the struggles and perceptions of particular groups and communities. One of Driver's key claims is that nationalism has been intimately connected to gender, with colonial and Afrikaner women having often been socialised into adopting "masculine" roles as "frontierswomen". These roles contrast diametrically with notions of housebound femininity, a characteristic often generally associated with white women's statuses. By dealing with the intimate connections between gender and nationalism, Driver initiated analysis that has become central to subsequent work in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology and history. With recent South African studies, scholars like Ann McClintock (cultural studies), Heike Becker (anthropology), Helen Bradford, Anne Mager and Patricia Hayes (history) have developed persuasive and in-depth studies of the connections between national identities, projects and narratives on one hand, and gendered identities, relations and tropes on the other.

While the eighties marked an explosion of gender research and teaching by white women, relatively few black women played an active role in the production of critical knowledge. The reasons for this are obvious: black South African women had extremely limited social and educational opportunities for acquiring skills and training in comparison with white women. Black women, because of the extremity of their oppression, also prioritised activism and everyday struggles in ways that few white women did; even when they did acquire the educational leverage for producing scholarship they had far fewer opportunities to do so. Lastly, the institutionalising of racism in South Africa severely limited black South African women's access to the publishing, research and teaching resources more easily available to white South African women academics and teachers.

On the whole, writing by black women in the eighties and early nineties was mainly autobiographical. Feminist scholarship and politics have long valued this disparaged genre as a source of women's knowledge and self-perceptions. In South Africa's hierarchical system of knowledge production, however, black women's autobiography has tended to be subordinated as "expression" of experience, rather than as a form of autonomous knowledge production. The vantage points and politics implicit in black women's autobiographies and life histories have therefore often been peripheral in relation to white feminist scholars' historical, sociological or literary interpretations. This is evidenced in the positioning of personal narratives in studies like Shula Marks' Not Either an Experimental Doll (1987) and Belinda Bozolli's Women of Phokeng (1991). Apart from the value of these works as studies of socially-marginalized experiences, they indicate how an interpreting scholarly voice can drown out the self-perceptions of black South African women as research subjects.

Given the marginalization of black women's personal narratives within the academic domain, and the paucity of black women scholars in South Africa, there was little evidence of a body of knowledge production - acknowledged within existing canons and traditions - by black South African women in the eighties and early nineties. However, the writers and publications discussed below contributed to political and intellectual agendas in important ways. Much of the important work produced was literary or autobiographical. Clearly, then, fiction and life history (and the publishing opportunities associated with these forms) offered greater scope for independent expression among black women than, for example, historical research, sociological commentary or journalism. If we consider the relative abundance of poetry, short-story writing, autobiography and novel-writing among black women in the eighties, it is clear that the creative licence offered by fiction and autobiography allowed black women writers to contest male and white-centred perspectives in very fruitful ways. As indicated below, many important political interventions have come in the form of what conventional scholarship often marginalizes as "purely fictive."

Bessie Head
As the child of a white woman and a black man in an obsessively colour-conscious world, Head wrote frequently about the effects of racialism in inter-personal relations and the shaping of consciousness, but is especially well-known for her early scrutiny of gender dynamics. Much of her fiction is set in Botswana, where she lived in exile, although she frequently deals with the implications of gender oppression and racism for South Africans. Novels like Maru (1971) and A Question of Power, as well as many of her short stories anthologised in The Collector of Treasures (1977), intricately disentangle power relations between men and women. These texts explore not only ways in which women have been dominated, silenced and sexually exploited, but also ways in which ordinary southern African women have directly and indirectly resisted their subordination. The political value of Head's insights into southern African gender politics rests on the way she develops detailed exploration of gendered power relations within particular contexts. Ever alert to the impact of particular ethnic, regional, class and communal circumstances that shape behaviour and consciousness among women and men, Head astutely demonstrates how relational gender identity is and intervenes into the assumption that gender oppression and identity can be explored in universalistic ways.

Miriam Tlali
Miriam Tlali rose to prominence as one of the few women writers within a fictional tradition often known as "literature of resistance". This tradition was significantly shaped by the rise of Black Consciousness and the student revolts of the seventies, and drew considerably on the Black Consciousness philosophy and politics of the time. Tlali's writing, most notably, Footprints in the Quag (1989), Mihloti (1984), Muriel at Metropolitan (1979) and Amandla (1986) was important in highlighting women's experiences and perspectives in the context of male-centred, Black Consciousness philosophy and activism. Much of her work deals with black women as workers and mothers, and sharply demonstrates that many South African women, although often subsumed under the political category of "black", have had very distinct gendered experiences of oppression and exclusion. Although Tlali's fiction predates the political focus on women within the anti-apartheid struggle, it anticipates the analysis - commencing mainly from the mid-eighties - of black women's compound oppression from within the national liberation movement.

Gcina Mhlope
Well-known as a story-teller and oral performer, Gcina Mhlope wrote a number of short fictional pieces that have had a major impact on other writers and on those involved or interested in black South African women's struggles. Two of her most noteworthy writings are "Say No Black Woman", a poem, and "The Toilet", a short story. The former is an impassioned address to all black women to refuse a "back seat" in the liberation struggle. Refusing to accept the notion that airing details about conflict between black men and black women amounts to a betrayal of black solidarity and the struggle against white racism, the poem implies that gender struggles should be waged in conjunction with other struggles against injustice.

"The Toilet" is an important reminder that black women's struggles for self-expression are very different from those of many privileged women. Based on Mhlope's own life experiences as an aspiring writer, the story describes the efforts of an independent young black woman to realise her desire to write and to resist her class, racial and gendered discrimination. In a sense, the story responds to what is seen as the universality of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own by illustrating that women's experiences are highly differentiated, and that struggles for creative expression among poor and racially persecuted women will always differ from those of privileged women.

Noni Jabavu, The Ochre People (1963)
Noni Jabavu's autobiography was written before the wave of autobiographical writing by black women in the eighties. Many consider it conservative and even Eurocentric. Yet it offers an important inside view of the life of a black woman born into a relative privileged family and significantly distanced from the majority of black South African women in terms of life-style, opportunities, cultural affiliation and politics during the sixties. As is the case with many other autobiographies, it demonstrates the complexities of subjectivity, questioning the monolithic construct of "black South African womanhood" and drawing attention to how particular histories and locations have influenced gendered consciousness and political choices among black South Africans. The autobiography also testifies to the determined spirit of a mid-century black South African woman as she struggles to develop intellectually and creatively.

Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (1985)
Ellen Kuzwayo achieved international recognition for this autobiography, which is often considered to be the most influential written record of black South African women's struggles produced by a black South African woman. Describing her childhood and adult experience as a teacher, social worker and activist at the height of anti-apartheid protest, Kuzwayo offers a textured view of her responses to state repression, racism and gendered dynamics in the private and public sphere. What surfaces again and again in the account is that the narrator's domestic and public experiences are constantly shaped by her gendered location. Awareness of this "multiple identification" has had important implications for theories and politics of feminism in South Africa, with Kuzwayo's text contributing to much writing about this in the public domain. The combination of first-hand account, personal life narrative and social history makes this autobiography tremendously valuable to those interested in experiences and perspectives usually sidelined or excluded from conventional scholarship. Moreover, the author in many ways launched a tradition of black women's autobiography in the eighties. Following the publication and success of Call Me Woman, a number of other black South African women wrote and published their life stories.

Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (1989)
Like Kuzwayo, Mashinini presents a vivid account of life for a woman who balances trade unionism and political activism with domestic work and conventional "womanly" roles. Her book is also noteworthy in describing wide-ranging forms of gender-based violence at the domestic level and at the level of apartheid's repressive machinery. Through her realistic descriptions of everyday occurrences and interactions, Mashinini probes the way that behaviour, roles and attitudes for black men and women are shaped by the confluence of race and gender. For example, she offers insight into ways in which many black women have taken on excessively supportive roles, and shows how draining these can be. She also highlights the fact that gender-based violence and wife-battering have been intimately connected to the broader violence of apartheid South Africa, with many oppressed men venting their anger on women whom they are close to. Mashinini's book was published at a time when sociological and historical interest in South African experiences focused on material and group relations. Her work therefore contributes to understanding how consciousness and subjectivity have been moulded by racial and gender injustices.

Fatima Meer and the Institute for Black Research
As a prominent activist and academic who has also always defined herself as a feminist, Fatima Meer gave important direction to black women's studies by examining women's lives, first independently (see "Black Women, Durban, 1975: Case Studies of 85 Women at Home and Work" (976) and "The Black Woman in South Africa" (1976); and later under the umbrella of the Institute for Black Research based in Durban. Focusing especially on wage and domestic labour, the institute's work on women offered crucial statistical and analytical knowledge about women and work in South Africa.

One of the key publications of the Institute was Factory and Family (1984), based on interviews among researchers with a range of South African women. As a publication with text in both English and Zulu, the report sought not only to provide a record, but also to reach a wide audience and so offer a resource for strategising and struggles among women workers themselves. Published in 1990, Black-Woman-Worker: A Study in Patriarchy and Woman Production Workers in South Africa is a more detailed, scholarly project. Combining historical overview, case studies and records based on interviews and field-work, the book develops an acute and precise analytical exploration of the exploitation of women's work in South Africa's racist and capitalist context.

Christine Qunta Women in Southern Africa (1987)
Women in Southern Africa, edited by Christine Qunta, comprises accounts of nine southern African countries, with sections on South Africa being located within a broader regional legacy of women's pre-colonial and colonial experiences. The emphasis in the collection on life narratives can be seen as key in counteracting the trend to define African women's experiences as the raw material of scholarly experts. The biographies of black women have the effect of highlighting the value of Southern African women's agency, and so counteracts tendencies to position black women only as victims of multiple oppression. Qunta's book could be included in a tradition of scholarship by African women that seeks to commemorate an independent legacy of struggles and triumphs among African women. This tradition comprises the work of Ifi Amadiume and Oyeronke Oyewumi, and has, importantly, not been a prominent feature of scholarship by women in southern Africa. Overall, Women in Southern Africa (1987) is key in expressing the assertive and independent spirit that, from the late eighties, became an increasingly important force in the consciousness and theorising of militant black South African women academics, writers and activists. Acknowledging the need to contest gender oppression and white supremacy, many focused on theoretical and political models rooted in their unique vantage points and experiences.

Mamphela Ramphele
Mamphela Ramphele's work has spanned a range of activities, including independent scholarly work on women and gender in South Africa, like the writing of "The Position of African Women: Race and Gender "(1988) and the co-editing of Women Transforming Societies: Sub-Saharan Africa and Caribbean Perspectives (1991), an appointment as the Vice-Chancellor at one of South Africa's leading (historically white) universities; the setting up of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town and the writing of a provocative autobiography (1996). Ramphele has therefore directly contributed to black South African women's scholarship and writing, and helped create the conditions for advancing it. For example, during her term as VC at UCT, she produced a range of reports on racism, gender discrimination and sexual harassment, while her securing of funding for the African Gender Institute led to the development of an important space for gender teaching, networking and research in the country.

Ramphele's autobiography, A Life (1996) is an outspoken comment on male biases within the Black Consciousness movement in which she played a prominent part as a medical doctor and an activist. The autobiography is also key in exploring private life. It interrupts a legacy of overwhelmingly communally-oriented black testimonial writing by reflecting carefully on such themes as sexuality, desire and personal ambition. That these themes are explored by a woman narrator whose experiences are profoundly shaped by both patriarchy and racism, makes it a trailblazing exploration of marginalized consciousness and experience in South Africa.