Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: GWS in South Africa

Trends in Research, Politics and Teaching in the Eighties and Early Nineties

In many ways, the eighties marked a high point in gender awareness, politics and academia in South Africa. Awareness of the distinctiveness of gender struggles was strongly registered from within the ANC. And it is significant that, by the late eighties, the ANC was not only the largest anti-apartheid organisation, but also the organisation earmarked to play a key role in fashioning a new democratic dispensation. As a highly influential organisation, the ANC therefore articulated a commitment to gender analysis and gender justice that was often taken up and reflected in teaching and research.

It is noteworthy that women in the country's foremost anti-apartheid organisation had, since the fifties, defined distinct goals and agendas for themselves. The ANC Women's League was established in 1943 to involve women more systematically in Congress activities and led to women being granted full membership status within the organisation and the right to vote and participate at all levels. Just over a decade later, FSAW (the Federation of South African Women) was launched on the basis of a national conference of women in 1954 to pursue a non-racial national alliance among South African women broadly opposed to apartheid. The organisation was committed to a non-racial South Africa, and advocated that women be accorded full and equal participation in a democratic South Africa. FSAW produced a document that has been key to ongoing discussion of women's roles in the anti-apartheid movement: the Women's Charter. This document was important in claiming that certain men within the national liberation struggle perpetuated women's subordination and insisting that "freedom cannot be won for any one section or for the people as a whole as long as we women are in bondage" (quoted in Walker, 1991:157).

Some writers have argued that attention to women's oppression during the mid-1990s tended to be drowned out by the prioritising of concerted resistance to racial oppression, especially after the ANC was banned and both the ANC Women's League and FSAW stagnated. The pre-eminent emphasis on solidarity across lines of gender in the face of state repression was paramount in the seventies, when Black Consciousness dominated oppositional politics and women were directly and indirectly urged to align themselves with male-centred struggles.

It was from the start of the eighties that specific attention to gender oppression became increasingly important. Organisations like the Natal Organisation of Women, the United Women's Congress, the Federation of Transvaal Women and other UDF-aligned women's organisations offered structures for working women, students and activists to play more active and outspoken roles in the anti-apartheid politics that began to succeed Black Consciousness activism and philosophy. By the time of the release of political prisoners from the early nineties and the national preparation for dismantling apartheid, the ground had therefore been laid for systematically confronting both gender and racial injustices. From the late eighties, therefore, attention to women's issues surfaced in national political agendas for democratic transformation even more forcefully than it had before the clampdown on progressive politics in the fifties.

Two key events in this regard were the Malibongwe Conference and the drawing up of a Women's Charter of equality in the early nineties. Beyond South Africa's borders and largely under the guidance of the exiled ANC, the Malibongwe Conference, held in Amsterdam in January 1990, sought to unite women activists based in South Africa with those in exile to brainstorm around women's status and roles in a transforming South Africa. Hosted and organised by the women's section of the ANC and the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement under the theme of "Women United for a Non-Racial Democratic South Africa", the conference focused on women's liberation in relation to South Africa's transition to democracy during the nineties. It is therefore significant that pre-conference documentation and conference papers (on the themes of "Women's Oppression", "Culture and Tradition", "Children" and "The Emancipation of Women") were the work not of individuals, but of organisations and regional groupings. The collective and consensual orientation was aimed at developing resolutions, policy-making and organisation - at a national level - that would guide the negotiations, policy-making and political structures that would shape South Africa's transformation in the early nineties. The conference led to some important practical proposals, and animated discussion about potential constitutional guidelines for ensuring women's rights.

The formation of a Women's National Coalition (WNC) in 1992, comprising regional coalitions as well as numerous organisations, grew considerably out of the proposals of the Malibongwe Conference. The primary objective of this coalition was to monitor and ensure women's equality in the constitutional dispensation being negotiated by different parties and organisations at the time. Key to this was the drawing up of a Women's Charter, eventually released in 1994, aimed at providing a focus for building an effective national women's movement. Amanda Kemp, Nozizwe Madala, Asha Moodley and Elaine Salo have explored the mobilization of politically heterogeneous groupings in the coalition in the following way:

The negotiation of constitutional guidelines, the cessation of armed struggle, and the emergence of principles of representation among groups previously identified as absolute enemies or betrayers of the liberation struggle supplied a model and a justification for the formation of a forum through which women who harboured deep animosities could also identify common concerns. In creating the WNC, all of the major women's organizations allowed something larger and more representative to command an authority that none of them could achieve alone, making the WNC something that they could not avoid affiliating to as well as something that could not be controlled by any one organization. (1995:151)

Commenting on the legacy of the WNC in later years, Sheila Meintjes (1997) has noted that much of the energy of the leaders of this movement was progressively absorbed into parliamentary politics. She writes:

A small caucus of Parliamentarians have made significant interventions in the committee work they have undertaken. In 1996 the Budget was accompanied by the launch of a "Women's Budget", which focussed on the areas in which policy needed to address the specific needs of women, particularly amongst the urban poor and in the rural areas. This initiative was spearheaded by Pregs Govender, who was the Campaign Manager of the WNC until the elections. Another key area where the lobbying of Parliamentarians has made significant advances for women's concerns has been in the establishment of the Office of the Status of Women in the office of the Vice President, Thabo Mbeki. At the regional level, Gender Desks have been established in some regions, as well as regional Gender Commissions. (1997:15)

Overall, then, it has been within parliament and national politics that earlier gender debates and feminist leaders are playing an important role. The South African Constitution has been a key instrument for safeguarding women's rights and ensuring gender justice in a post-apartheid South Africa. Moreover, national machinery like the Commission on Gender Equality has provided a structure for systematically addressing gender equality at a national level. Moves towards mainstreaming gender justice within parliamentary politics has come through, for example, parliamentary committees comprising different political parties and both women and men, and indicate efforts to foreground gender as cross-cutting political concern, rather than to sideline women's issues as the exclusive responsibility of women MPs.

Consolidated research on women and gender studies from the eighties is well illustrated in the first South African journals devoted to gender research: Agenda, launched in 1987 and still published today, and Speak which first appeared in the early eighties. Both were initiated as the result of a felt need among women activists and researchers to table gender as a distinct issue for political consideration. Launched long before the first democratic election, the publications recognised that women's agendas could not be assumed within a newly democratic South Africa, and that women needed to be proactive and forthright in guaranteeing that their interests were addressed. Describing the mood among many women at the time, Shameem Meer writes:

We were feminists who were fed-up with the personal politics of men on the left. While adopting politically correct rhetoric they were able to make their mark in the liberation struggle because they had women to keep the home fires burning, to care for children and even at times, bring home a significant share of the bread. We wanted to address both the structural and more personal aspects of our oppression as women as a matter of urgency so that the liberation of our country would mean liberation for women. (1997:6).

The publications were launched in the context of a strong commitment to gender equity in progressive organisations and at a time when a range of women's organisations were forthrightly articulating women's demands. Writing published in Agenda and Speak therefore advanced the work produced in the seventies by providing a broad forum for foregrounding the centrality of gender to late twentieth-century South African politics.

Earlier gender research was considerably shaped by the perceived need to prioritise gender analysis in relation to a mass audience. Agenda, and to an even greater extent, Speak clearly highlight this. Shameem Meer sees this as part of broader assumptions behind progressive research in the late 80s: "Academics and students at many universities were making conscious efforts to link academia with activism through their research and writing and setting up units to service mass-based organisation" (1997:6). Contributions to the two feminist journals were not primarily concerned with conventional academic standards, but with issues of accessibility and topicality that would ensure that the publications' subject-matter reached a wide audience. Describing the vision of Agenda a decade after it first appeared, Michelle Friedman remarks: "The group of student and academic activists that started the project in 1987 felt that it was important to bridge the divide between research taking place in the university context and debates and campaigns taking place in women's organisations. From the outset its objectives and therefore conception of feminism were strongly related to the broader political context and environment of our time" (1997:17).

Subjects covered in early issues of Agenda and Speak also reveal a pre-eminent focus on topicality, relevance and what are often known as "bread-and-butter" issues. A survey of early trends reveals a particular emphasis on such topics as women and trade unions, women's experience of waged labour and domestic work, women's organisations and their experiences within and in relation to anti-apartheid movements like the UDF, COSATU and community organisations, profiles of prominent women leaders, as well as issues that directly affected women such as harassment and women's health care, and reports on important meetings and conferences.

One of the main concerns raised in gender research in the early nineties was the nature of women's involvement in politics. In many ways, this debate, coming at a stage before national democratic change, makes South Africa somewhat different from countries elsewhere in Africa. In many African countries, systematic gender research and publications started to emerge after decolonisation, at a stage when feminists and militant women actually experienced exclusion from male-dominated, post-independence nation-building and politics. South Africans had obviously learned from battles elsewhere. The amenability to and familiarity with feminist critical tools in political analysis meant that gender analysis was registered in relation to emerging scenarios like the ANC's policy guidelines for a post-apartheid South Africa. This is evident, for example in Thandabantu Nhlapo's "Women, Culture and a Bill of Rights in South Africa" (1994) and "African Customary Law in the Interim Constitution" (1995), and Nolulamo Gwagwa's "Towards a Gendered Urban Policy Debate" (1994).

A publication which captured the centrality of debate about gender prior to the first democratic election was Susan Bazilli's edited anthology, Putting Women on the Agenda (1991), a book which originated as papers presented at a conference organised by Lawyers for Human Rights, and was held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in November 1990. Work like this has augured well for a critical research climate on gender, with South Africa (together with Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana) currently exhibiting many challenging and critical conversations about meaningful gender justice.

The discussion of women in politics from the mid-eighties fed into discussion of how to categorise and define "feminism" and women's consciousness in South Africa. This generated tremendous debate. A text like Cherryl Walker's Women and Resistance in South Africa, recognised as a landmark study of black women in politics, argued that black South African women were mobilised as activists mainly as the handmaidens of male-centred struggles. Developing these themes, scholars like Shireen Hassim (1992) and Julia Wells (1991) demonstrated that women often played subordinate roles in relation to struggles that were not only led by men, but that were extremely masculinist. In a paper presented at the Natal Conference on Gender in Southern Africa in 1991, Wells coined the term "motherism" to describe the peripheral and supportive role that black women activists often played in relation to male-centred agendas for freedom.

Black women activists and scholars like Gertrude Fester, Yvonne Muthien, Cheryl Hendricks, Elaine Salo and Desiree Lewis dealt critically with these ideas, raising the importance of acknowledging women's roles in struggle as forms of consciousness-raising and activism that, irrespective of the ways in which men positioned them, led women into new and potentially liberating spaces. In an important argument, Yvonne Muthien suggests that black South African women's political involvement should be explored not only at the level of micro-politics, but should be "inserted in analysis and transformation at a national level" (1993:1). In her detailed study of women's organisation and resistance from the forties to the sixties, she shows that black women, through their involvement in communal struggles and organisations, played pivotal roles in building the nation-wide anti-apartheid resistance which male leaders are usually given credit for. This approach to black women in politics suggests that the idea of black women's peripheral political role is largely a construct of interpreters, and that careful attention to what black women have actually done uncovers important evidence of their political independence.

The controversies surrounding how to interpret black women's political roles were connected to another area that influenced debate, namely the tension between academics, on one level, and activists and black women on the other. At various gender workshops and meetings, controversies repeatedly erupted around who speaks for whom, with many black commentators claiming that they were constantly spoken for and about as the objects of others' research. Commenting on the power dynamics among South African women at three gender meetings held between 1991 and 1992, Pethu Serote remarked that entrenched racial hierarchies had led to meetings "running into crises of ad hoc arrangements which do very little to move the debate forward" (1992:23). She went on to argue: "If our intention is to build a strong women's movement that will effectively challenge the exclusion of women in decision-making organs of our organs and country, we need to confront the issue of power seriously. This would mean examining the power we have as individuals and as groups, the power we want and the way we want to seize and wield it" (1992:23).

An event that sharply marked the fraught relations between black and white South African women was the landmark "Women and Gender in Southern Africa" conference hosted by Natal University in 1992. There have already been numerous reports on this conference , and it would be repetitious to revisit them in detail here. Suffice it to say that the tone of the debate was extremely fraught and for many black women raised many past and ongoing injustices.

Debates about the politics of representation in South Africa were often couched in the form of who has the right to interpret whom on the basis of experience, with some insisting that certain white women have proved their credentials in struggle and should not be challenged when they write about black women's experiences of struggle and resistance (see Fouche, 1993). In response, scholars like Funani (1993) used the argument that only black women could legitimately and authentically represent other black women's experiences. Overall, early debates frequently ignored the politics of knowledge production in different approaches towards and methodologies underpinning research. This might have raised matters of ethics and methodology and helped address conflicts more proactively.

Apart from the surfacing of these key debates between the mid-80s and the early 90s, gender research in academia underwent some important consolidating developments. Key areas explored include the following:

Women and Politics
Gender researchers' emphasis in studies of politics until the early nineties tended to focus mainly on women's roles in politics, rather than on the impact of gender relations and identities as a cross-cutting political concern. Jacklyn Cock's Colonels and Cadres, published in 1991, was seminal because of its attention to connections between gender and the pervasive militarization of South African society. Cock's analysis of gendered hierarchies and identities at different levels of South African society prefigures the detailed gender analysis in recent work by feminist historians, sociologists and anthropologists.

With the exception of a work like Jacklyn Cock's Maids and Madams, research between the eighties and early nineties tended to focus either on black or on white women. The practical and political reasons for this are obvious, since black and white South African women have, to all intents and purposes, inhabited disparate worlds. In many discussions of black women in politics, writers have explored black women's active roles in anti-apartheid struggles and the various organisations that supported the broader national liberation movement. Some writers have lauded this, identifying women's political involvement as evidence of their rejecting debilitating stereotypes of womanhood. These writers have produced works including autobiographies like Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman, biographical projects like Diana Russell's Lives of Courage (1989), magazine or journal articles in publications like Speak and Agenda, and book-length sociological studies like Hilda Bernstein's For Their Triumphs and for Their Tears: Conditions and Resistance of Women in Apartheid South Africa (1975).

Far less attention has been paid to organised white women's movements and politics, with many writers focusing on a particular period, namely, the early 1900s and the suffragette movement. As a leading researcher in this field, Cherryl Walker has argued that South Africa's Women's Enfranchisement Act in 1930 firmly entrenched racial polarisation in South Africa and displaced any reasons among white women for feminist activism. White women's acquisition of the right to vote at the start of the century located them securely within a camp of privilege and weakened any interest in contesting the status quo and supporting other voteless South Africans. As early as the 1800s, Olive Schreiner, especially in Women and Labour (1911), identified the complicity of the majority of white South African women with the racial status quo and illustrated how their racial privilege eroded their sense of political and social subordination to white men. Schreiner's involvement in the Women's Enfranchisement League in the Cape intersected with her political identification with Afrikaners and blacks, who, like English-speaking South African women, were effectively disenfranchised by the government's discriminatory laws of the time. By arguing that white women were likely to become increasingly complacent as their privileges increased, Schreiner anticipated conclusions drawn in later work, like Cherryl Walker's, On White Women's Politics. Generally speaking, progressive political action among white women has been linked to the courage of particular individuals. Consequently, the study of white women in twentieth-century South African politics has concentrated on individuals like Ruth First, Hilda Bernstein and Ray Alexander and on an organisation, like the Black Sash, which drew together the small groups of white women who resisted apartheid (see Michaelman's The Black Sash of South Africa).

Pre-colonial Societies and Gender Relations
Cherryl Walker (1990) has played a prominent part in developing this research from a feminist perspective, although scholars like Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (1980), and Jeff Guy (1990) have dealt with women's roles in pre-capitalist modes of production. Their work, however, falls mainly into a Marxist, rather than a gender-inflected tradition, and is open to Bozzoli's criticism that there has been a tendency within the left to "absorb feminist struggles, or indeed subordinate them, into the general struggle against capitalism" (1983: 142). Overall, however, rigorous analysis of women's productive and reproductive roles has helped to sharpen attention to analysing women's work. It has helped to provide critical tools among scholars, activists and NGOs, for confronting ways in which women's labour has been exploited and naturalised.

Women and Labour in the Twentieth Century
In addition to the abundant empirical work on black women's labour from the early nineteenth century (a marked feature of research in the seventies and early eighties), gender scholars have sharpened their analysis of women's exploited labour in relation to particular forms of capitalist production and patriarchy. Much work has focused on women in situations where men have been migrant labourers or where women are primary producers and breadwinners. This work has therefore analysed culturally distinct forms of family life and shown how black women have usually straddled responsibilities for both domestic and wage labour to support their families.

In a provocative article published in 1990, Catherine Campbell dealt with family dynamics in black townships and concluded that "It is mothers who often take the major responsibility for managing the scarce resources available to most working-class families" (1990:6). Developing a related argument, Julia Wells in The History of Black Women's Struggle Against Pass Laws in South Africa, 1900-1960, (1982) argued that black women have capitalized on their position in between white capitalist and rural township economies, because they had not been as affected by formal restriction on their mobility as black men. As a leading researcher on women's work, Iris Berger (1982) has extended this argument to conclude that black South African women have been more politically militant than men because their partial incorporation into the white economy has meant that they have less to lose from resisting it.

Literary Studies
The field of literary studies witnessed an explosion in research and teaching in the late 80s and early 90s. An early focus on making women's writing visible gave way increasingly in teaching and research to theorisation of women's subjectivities and analysis of the distinct ways in which women represented their experiences and often forged new styles and genres. Here journals such as Current Writing and English in Africa were central in launching South African scholarly attention to feminist theory. Alongside the focus on feminist theory, evidenced particularly in Current Writing's (1990) and English in Africa's (1992) special issues on feminism, was critical work on women's writing (for example, Cheryl Clayton's edited collection, Women and Writing in South Africa (1983), Dorothy Driver's edition of critical essays on Pauline Smith (1983), works on Olive Schreiner edited by Cherry Clayton (1983) and Carol Barash (1987) as well as many anthologies of black and white women's writing and a renewed interest by progressive publishing houses like Skotaville, Ad Donker, Ravan and David Philip in women writers like Sheila Fugard and Miriam Tlali.

One of the main themes in literary research was the difference (in terms of both content and literary style) between black and white women's writing. Cecily Lockett (1990) and Cherry Clayton (1989) stressed that white women often had the leisure to experiment with different fictional styles and to probe interiority in ways that black women, focusing mainly on collective and overtly political concerns, did not. These generalisations were to give way in later years to detailed analysis of the complexities and ambiguities of individual texts.