violation of human rights from 1950 to 1960 essay pdf

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The Role South African Women Played Against the Violation of Human Rights from the 1950s to 1960s

The pivotal role South African women played against the violation of human rights from the 1950s to the 1960s under the apartheid regime cannot be understated. Their collective actions and the resultant legacy serve as a beacon of resistance and empowerment, illustrating the profound impact of female solidarity and bravery against systemic oppression.

Table of Contents

Historical Background of Apartheid and Human Rights Violations

Apartheid, a policy of racial segregation and discrimination, inflicted widespread violations of human rights, particularly against black South Africans. The government’s repressive policies posed a direct threat to all people of color, sparking mass political action and resistance.

Pioneering Female Figures and Movements

The role of South African women in this era was marked by significant protests and the establishment of movements aimed at combating these human rights violations. Women’s organizations like the Black Sash, founded by white women in 1955, and the ANC Women’s League, formed in 1948, were crucial in mobilizing opposition against the apartheid regime.

Tactics and Contributions

Women employed various tactics from grassroots organizing to participation in national protests. Notable was the 1956 march of nearly 20,000 women to Pretoria, protesting the pass laws. This march is celebrated annually on August 9th, South African Women’s Day, acknowledging their significant role in the struggle.

Impact and Legacy

The activism of South African women not only challenged the apartheid laws but also laid the groundwork for future generations in the fight for equality and justice. The legacy of their resistance is visible today in the political and social landscape of South Africa, where women continue to hold significant positions of power and influence.

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Modern Reflections

The bravery and resilience of these women continue to inspire current and future generations in South Africa and around the world. Their fight against apartheid and for human rights is a testament to the strength and impact of organized women’s movements.

FAQ Section:

Q1: Who were some notable South African women activists during the 1950s and 1960s?

A1: Key figures include Albertina Sisulu, a political activist, and Lilian Ngoyi, an ANC leader who played significant roles in anti-apartheid activities and the 1956 women’s march.

Q2: What was the significance of the 1956 women’s march to Pretoria?

A2: The march was a pivotal moment in South African history, showing the strength and solidarity of women from diverse backgrounds uniting against the oppressive pass laws.

Q3: How did the activism of South African women in the 1950s and 1960s impact the apartheid regime?

A3: Their activism brought international attention to the injustices of apartheid, significantly contributing to the mounting pressure that eventually led to the regime’s downfall.

The role South African women played against the violation of human rights from the 1950s to the 1960s remains a powerful example of how collective action can lead to significant social change. Their courage and unity continue to inspire movements for justice and equality worldwide.

Article contents

Women and apartheid.

Meghan Healy-Clancy Meghan Healy-Clancy Department of History, Bridgewater State University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.184
Published online: 28 June 2017

Apartheid, the system of racial and ethnic separation introduced in South Africa in 1948, was a gendered project. The immediate goal of the white Afrikaner men who led the apartheid state was to control black men: to turn black men from perceived political and criminal threats into compliant workers. Under apartheid, African men would travel to work for whites in towns and on mines, but their homes would be in rural ethnic “reserves,” known as “homelands” or “Bantustans.” This vision depended on the labors of African women: while their men migrated to work, women were to maintain their families in the increasingly overcrowded and desolate countryside, reproducing the workforce cheaply while instilling a sense of ethnic difference in their children. “Coloured” (mixed-race) and Indian women were similarly charged with social reproduction on a shoestring, in segregated rural and urban areas. White women uniquely had the franchise and freedom of movement, but they were also constrained by sexually repressive laws.

Apartheid’s gendered vision of production and social reproduction faced continual resistance, and it ultimately failed. First, it failed because African women increasingly moved from rural areas to urban centers, despite laws limiting their mobility. Second, it failed because some women organized across ethnic and racial lines. They often organized as mothers, demanding a better world for a new generation. Both their nationally and internationally resonant campaigns—against pass laws, educational and health care inequities, police brutality, and military conscription—and the fact of their collective organization gradually undermined apartheid. Officials generally underestimated the power of women, and their contributions have continued to be under-appreciated since apartheid ended in 1994, because women’s political style emphasized personal and familial concerns. But because apartheid was premised on transforming how families lived, actions of women in fact undermined the system from its core.

South Africa

State interventions into the formation and lives of families were central to apartheid: the legal regime of racial and ethnic division that ruled South Africa between the election of Daniel Malan in 1948 and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 , with legacies enduring through the present. From the regime’s inception under the leadership of Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister Malan, ideas of racial purity, sexual restraint, and patriarchy were intertwined. Apartheid’s immediate goal was to control black men—turning them from political threats into compliant workers, to ensure South Africa’s development into an industrialized state in which whites would enjoy growing wealth and political hegemony. But apartheid could only work by also controlling women. Apartheid leaders were concerned with black women (a category that includes women classified as African, Indian, or “Coloured”), as well as with white women (both Afrikaners like apartheid leaders, and women from British and other European backgrounds). Officials saw women as central to creating properly ethnicized and racialized subjects, who would fill their prescribed niches in an economy and polity controlled by white men.

Black women undermined the visions of apartheid from its onset. First, many black women refused to be held in place. African women were supposed to remain confined to rural ethnic “reserves” (known as “homelands” or “Bantustans”), cheaply raising compliant workers and ethnic subjects there while their husbands labored for low wages for whites in towns and on the mines. But from apartheid’s start, women increasingly went to town. African women who stayed on the reserves did not all submit quietly to apartheid’s demands, either. Rural women’s organized resistance—in both political organizations and religious groups—was formidable, attracting both state oppression and gradual reforms. As key urban women activists were forced to the countryside in line with apartheid’s strategies of banning activists, the liveliness of rural resistance only grew.

Across South Africa, across lines of race and class, activist women came together to resist apartheid. While they also worked with men, women particularly organized as mothers—a fitting riposte to a regime rooted in restructuring families. Even as their campaigns attracted national and international support, apartheid officials underestimated their impact, generally seeing women as less threatening political actors than men. Since apartheid ended in 1994 , women’s contributions to the regime’s collapse have continued to attract less popular and scholarly attention than men’s contributions. Yet controlling personal lives and transforming families were core objectives of apartheid policies. Through both individual and collective action, the gendered life choices of many diverse women therefore undermined apartheid from within.

Male-Led Nationalist Movements and the Roots of Apartheid

In May 1948 , the National Party (NP) won the South African general election, inaugurating the era of apartheid: “apartness” in Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived language of the NP’s Afrikaner leaders. The National Party heightened the segregationist policies that had ruled the Union of South Africa since its 1910 formation as a British dominion, ruled by an alliance of British and Afrikaner men. Apartheid added an ideological emphasis on the development of Afrikaners and South Africa’s other ethnic groups, each as a separate volk (people) with distinct racial destinies. 1 Very few black men, and no black women, had the franchise in 1948 . Whites, who then made up about a quarter of South Africa’s population, therefore determined this election: they included both men and women, as white women had the franchise since 1930 , as part of a state strategy to diminish the influence of the small number of black men with the vote. 2

Women as well as men generated the ideas that animated Afrikaner nationalism. They highlighted the historical role of Afrikaners—mostly descendants of 17th-century Dutch settlers in the Cape—in bringing Christianity and European civilization to southern Africa. They mourned Afrikaners’ history of oppression on the frontiers of a growing British Empire, particularly Britain’s brutal treatment of women and children in the South African War a half century before. They called for the urgent uplift of poor Afrikaners, to advance their “race”—against the threat posed by the British-descended South Africans who had for the past century and a half exercised influence in politics and the economy on one hand, and against the increasing threats from politically assertive black South Africans on the other. 3

The black South Africans who so alarmed Afrikaner nationalists included men and women in the African National Congress (ANC) and similar organizations advocating rights for indigenous Africans, as well as other black people known as “Coloureds” (mixed-race) and Indians (descended from the indentured workers and immigrants who came to Natal from the 19th century ). Women played key ideological roles in these groups, stressing their history of protecting their families against the depravities of colonialism and calling for black people to end white domination. But women also struggled against dismissal of their voices by the activist men who led these groups. Women, both black and white, similarly asserted themselves in the male-led Communist Party (CP), which increasingly supported movements for racial equality in South Africa from the mid-1920s through its banning in 1950 . 4

It was important to the formation of apartheid policies that, despite the role of women at the grassroots of both Afrikaner and black movements, the leaders of the NP and its rivals in 1948 were all men. 5 The specter of black men unwilling to submit to white authority, and the inability of the ruling United Party (UP) to make them submit, loomed large in the NP’s 1948 campaign. While the NP achieved its narrow victory with strong support from rural whites, it appealed to white fears of black men in cities. In South Africa, as across the continent in the wake of the Second World War, urban black men were at the helm of organizations that launched boycotts and strikes demanding their rights against white male leaders. The NP particularly feared the potential of activists to spread communism, destroying what they saw as Afrikaner Christian civilization. 6 The NP’s solution was to develop a “white man’s country,” headed by Afrikaner patriarchs. 7

Legislating Sex and Family: The Foundations of Apartheid

Foundational pieces of apartheid legislation tellingly targeted love and sex—demonstrating how control over sex was critical to the production and maintenance of racial difference. 8 In 1949 , the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act barred marriage between “Europeans” (white South Africans, including Afrikaners, British, and other immigrants from Europe) and “non-Europeans” (African, Coloured, and Indian South Africans). 9 It was followed by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 , which prohibited sex between whites and all blacks. This extended the 1927 Immorality Act, which had already restricted sex outside of marriage between whites and Africans: the word “native” in the original act was replaced by the more encompassing “non-European” here. 10 These broadening and hardening restrictions on intimacy revealed officials’ sense that “European civilization” in southern Africa was under siege, and the first place to shore it up was the family home. Interracial sex and marriage would remain illegal until 1985 . 11

Controlling intimacy entailed categorizing people. In the Immorality Amendment Act, the terms “European” and “non-European” were defined culturally: “‘European’ means a person who in appearance obviously is, or who by general acceptance and repute is a European,” and vice versa. 12 Soon after, the Population Registration Act of 1950 established a national register, to categorize each South African more bindingly by race and ethnicity. 13 The accompanying Group Areas Act established the country’s firm segregation along racial and ethnic lines, with specific “groups” restricted to specific regions and neighborhoods; black married women’s ethnicity followed that of their husbands. 14 This legislation displaced black families from their homes and communities, as mixed neighborhoods such as Johannesburg’s Sophiatown and Cape Town’s District Six were declared “white areas.” Ultimately, some 3.5 million black South Africans would be forced to move under apartheid. 15 Families could also be separated when the race of their children fell into doubt. 16

The apartheid state’s struggle for control over racial reproduction manifested in family-planning policies that urged white women to have children while encouraging black women to limit family size. Puritanical, DRC-influenced ideas of women’s chastity discouraged the pursuit of sexual pleasure and agency for all women. While abortion was illegal for all South African women, spectacular court cases concerned white rather than black women. Intrusive policies, supported by many employers and the state, required black women to have contraceptive injections to keep their jobs; doctors employed sterilization far more readily for black women than for whites throughout the apartheid years. Black women’s primary modes of employment—domestic service, farm labor, factory work, teaching, nursing, and clerical work—were not conductive to pregnancy, forcing many mothers to send their children to live with distant relatives. Due to black men’s low wages, black women were much more likely to need to work than white women, connecting reproductive rights to labor issues. 17

Gendered labor policies were at the heart of apartheid, in intersection with marriage and housing policies. To secure the labor of black men while limiting their presence in towns and cities declared to be predominantly white areas, an existing system of male migrant labor was further entrenched. This system had emerged with the development of diamond and gold mining over the latter half of the 19th century : labor recruiters, chiefs, and rural African families sent young men to work in distant towns, while African women were to support rural families, leading to growing domestic tensions. 18 From 1952 , African men aged sixteen or older legally had to carry identity documents called passes with them, to justify their presence outside of the rural ethnic “reserves” to which officials consigned Africans. 19 As the land in these reserves was insufficient in size and quality, men needed to work in urban areas to support themselves and their families, and to pay taxes. They could generally only reside in urban areas as long as their passes attested to employment by whites, staying in hostels intended for temporary sojourns in segregated areas called “townships.” Exceptions were those who had been born in the urban area where they lived, who had lived in that area legally for fifteen years, or who had worked for the same employer in that area for a decade: such men and their dependents had “Section Ten” rights to live in urban townships as a family, as long as they were not deemed “idle” or “undesirable.” 20 Most urban housing was deliberately unwelcoming to families, who were supposed to remain in the countryside, eking out a living by women’s farming, to supplement the low wages received by migrant men. 21

In rural areas filled increasingly with African women and children, the authority of male chiefs—both hereditary and appointed—reigned supreme. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 entrenched chiefly authority to administer “customary law,” a patriarchal system under which African women remained legal minors throughout their lives. Legal minor status meant that African women could not enter into contracts or own homes or other property in their own right; children legally belonged to their fathers or male kin. Customary law collapsed and distorted diverse precolonial African legal systems in which women had generally held more authority, especially as they aged. 22 The distorted power of “traditional” chiefs deepened in the 1960s. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 provided the legal basis for the “gradual development of self-governing Bantu national units” out of the ethnic reserves to which Africans were consigned. 23 Ten rural ethnic reserves formed: officials called them “homelands” or “Bantustans,” and in 1970 , the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act declared Africans “citizens” of their homelands, not of South Africa. 24 Reforms in the 1980s allowed for African women’s growing emancipation from customary law: for instance, in 1981 the KwaZulu Bantustan introduced reforms so that adult women, married or unmarried, could legally own property and make other legal decisions, following popular pressure. 25 But African women continued to struggle against chiefly authority that privileged men.

As wives, women were generally subject to their husband’s authority. This was true not only for African women, but also for other black and white women; unless they secured a prenuptial contract, the default through most of apartheid was that even privileged white women lost power to make legal decisions upon marriage. 26 As mothers, however, women were charged with the critical responsibility of raising a new generation of workers and ethnic patriots. For Africans, this new generation was supposed to see their political futures not in “white South Africa” but in their rural ethnic reserves. African mothers were to send their children to new state schools, in an ethnically differentiated system called Bantu Education, while Indian, Coloured, and white women were to send their children to distinct schools. 27

At the crux of apartheid production and social reproduction therefore stood women, whom officials intended to be compliant wives and mothers in a segregated society. But increasing numbers of women refused to stand in their imposed places.

Black Women’s Urban Mobility Challenges Apartheid

Black women had lived in towns and cities long before apartheid, attracted to urban life both by a desire to escape rural familial tensions and by economic necessity. African access to land had been severely restricted since the Natives Land Act of 1913 , with clearly declining land productivity by the 1920s, and the rural reserves grew more stressed with apartheid’s forced relocations. Women’s options for formal urban employment were limited, with most consigned to domestic service. But women had long been developing a vibrant informal urban sector: they brewed and sold beer and other foods to male migrant workers and operated bars called “shebeens,” among other jobs. By the early 1950s, more than a fifth of African women were urban, and many of these women lived in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. 28

While black women’s urbanity concerned officials before apartheid—especially when they worked as prostitutes—officials had never been sure what to do about it. African men in major cities had been required to carry individual passes before apartheid, although laws varied by municipality. 29 But officials had rarely imposed individual passes on women. This was, first, because attempts to do so had engendered resistance, as seen in Bloemfontein in 1913 , when hundreds marched against pass laws for black women. 30 At a deeper level, officials expected African women to be governed through their men. When laws referred to “natives,” they usually meant African men; African women were seldom singled out as political subjects, as they were legal minors under customary law and thus not proper “persons” in their own rights. 31 The language of 1952 pass-law legislation was characteristically vague—first stating that pass laws would apply to “every native” aged sixteen or older, but then shifting to masculine pronouns. 32

Officials prevaricated about when and how pass laws would be extended to African women under the terms of the 1952 legislation, facing public outrage about this intrusion into family life. 33 Then, in 1955 , officials announced that individual passes would soon be issued to African women; women’s organized resistance, discussed in the next section, delayed full implementation of this requirement until 1963 .

Yet women kept moving to cities, whether or not they could claim Section Ten rights or passes testifying to their legal right to be there temporarily. Many lived covertly in “informal settlements” of shacks, or with men in migrant labor hostels. They faced frequent prosecution for breaking the law and forced deportations to Bantustans: this risk was especially pronounced for Africans in Cape Town, where most working-class jobs were reserved for “Coloured” men, and where African women had access to few formal jobs outside of low-paid domestic service. 34 But women often turned right around after their deportations to catch the next bus into town, despite feeling “like a hare being chased around, hunted.” 35 The everyday presence of black families—in urban spaces legally defined as white, where black people were only supposed to appear as necessary to meet white labor needs—powerfully challenged core tenets of apartheid. 36 Ultimately, the expense of combatting this unstoppable movement of black families to cities forced apartheid officials to end pass laws in 1986 . 37 African women’s migration then accelerated, with continually rising numbers of female-headed households. 38 Black women’s defiant mobility thus worked to renegotiate relationships between genders and generations.

Amidst this insistent mobility, growing numbers of women in rural reserves were also not fulfilling the roles that officials envisioned. Resistance to the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 surged quickly, and women played key roles in rejecting the cooption of chiefly authority and implementation of new agricultural policies, with organized protests in places including the Western Transvaal area of Zeerust ( 1957 ) and the Natal countryside ( 1959 ). The latter protests significantly linked urban and rural issues, as women protested both apartheid removals from the interracial urban community of Cato Manor in Durban and intrusive “betterment schemes” and taxes in the rural reserves surrounding the city. 39 While the ANC did not initiate these protests, its members were involved in them, and ANC membership increased in their aftermath. Rural women’s engagement in religious groups such as mothers’ prayer unions ( manyano ), which also boasted linked urban branches, provided another font for growing anti-apartheid organization. Cyclical migration—driven by forced removals and by women’s decisions to return to rural areas after periods of work in cities—kept urban and rural communities linked. 40

Anti-apartheid linkages between towns and countryside would only accelerate as apartheid officials increasingly “banned” political leaders to remote districts, to try to eliminate them as national leaders amidst surging protests from the 1950s. This strategy could backfire, as banned leaders connected with people in these rural districts whom they would not otherwise have met. Women often made these connections by engaging in social-welfare work, which seemed less objectionable to officials than overt political organizing. Most famously, during their bannings in the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Consciousness movement activist Mamphela Ramphele and the ANC activist Winnie Mandela organized health clinics, which became centers for spreading anti-apartheid ideas. 41 The politicizing role of health care speaks to women’s broader sociocultural style of anti-apartheid organization.

Women’s Collective Organization Challenges Apartheid

The pattern of male leadership of political movements, and women’s influence at movements’ grassroots, persisted through the apartheid years, with women tending to play influential roles in sociocultural wings of the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1950s, women first organized against apartheid as mothers, uniting across lines of race and class. Both the achievements and limits of their foundational strategies set a pattern, which would emerge vividly in the 1960s and 1970s. The pattern was that women would organize most effectively by using discourses of family. But when women raised sensitive issues pertaining to their own family lives that did not fit within activist campaigns, men often dismissed these issues as ancillary to immediate political struggles. Many women would come to share male leaders’ emphasis on family as a strategic political discourse more than an immediate site of political struggle. This was so especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when major liberation movements were forced into exile and key male and female leaders banned, heightening the stakes of eliminating anything deemed a “distraction.” Finally, in the 1980s and during the transition to democracy in the 1990s, women increasingly challenged activists’ sublimation of personal issues in political arenas, using indigenous and international forms of feminist critique.

The Congress Alliance and Federation of South African Women in the 1950s: The Foundational Period

In the 1950s, opposition to apartheid centered in the Congress Alliance: a front of anti-apartheid movements in which the ANC played a predominant role, in partnership with the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the white leftist Congress of Democrats. The Congress Alliance was a “multiracial” organization because it comprised those racially distinct affiliate organizations. In the mid-1950s, two major nonracial member organizations—comprising both black and white members—joined the Congress Alliance: the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). Women played important roles in the SACTU, as unions provided a distinctive forum in which women could unite as workers across racial lines. 42 And female trade unionists played central roles in the 1954 launching of FEDSAW—as did women from the ANC.

FEDSAW’s first president was Ida Mtwana, former president of the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL); her better-known successor as FEDSAW’s leader, Lilian Ngoyi, also served as president of the ANCWL. Both women worked in the garment industry, and their activism characteristically emphasized issues of work and family. On one hand, the women often spoke of women’s commitment to anti-apartheid struggle as necessitating that they move away from domestic responsibilities. For instance, Mtwana declared at FEDSAW’s founding meeting, “Gone are the days when the place of women was in the kitchen and looking after the children. Today, they are marching side by side with men in the road to freedom,” in political meetings and in trade unions. But Mtwana went on to stress that women’s public activism was rooted in their responsibilities as mothers: “We cannot sit down and fold our arms when attempts are being made to hold our progress and that of our children . . . If we do not fight now, it will be too late, and our children will curse us for our callousness.” 43

Such invocations of familial responsibilities should not be taken narrowly as statements about individual women’s lives, but broadly as skillful public discourse. Several key FEDSAW leaders—including Miss Ida Mtwana—were unmarried or childless themselves. Black women drew upon the public leadership they exercised as mothers in their communities to forge ties across racial lines, appealing to white women through appeals to a shared moral economy of motherhood. Discourses of motherhood therefore demonstrated black women’s rejection of apartheid ideas of white women as “empire builders” and black mothers as social problems, and reflected black women’s bold political imagination of a shared community of mothers with a responsibility for creating an anti-racist world. 44

Unifying maternal discourses were an achievement, because divisions between black and white women ran deep. After all, the major space of interracial encounter was domestic service, where black women tended intimately to the needs of white “madams” and their children for low pay, often living away from their own children to stay in the backyards of their employers. 45 Moreover, white women had won suffrage in 1930 at the expense of black men’s loss of their limited franchise, something that black activists did not forget. 46 Making connections across racial lines—including among African, Coloured, and Indian women, who increasingly lived in separate communities—was a great challenge.

Despite tensions, FEDSAW succeeded in uniting women as mothers against apartheid policies that divided black families and communities: centrally, against pass laws and Bantu Education. In June 1955 , FEDSAW participated in the Congress Alliance’s Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg, where FEDSAW issued a list of “What Women Demand,” beginning with claims to rights such as paid maternity leave, child care, and contraception “FOR ALL MOTHERS OF ALL RACES.” 47 Famously, FEDSAW then organized multiracial delegations of women to march on the seat of the apartheid government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria. FEDSAW and COD member Helen Joseph was inspired by a liberal white women’s organization, Black Sash, which had been “haunting” apartheid officials by surrounding them with groups of women wearing the eponymous black sashes, signs of mourning against apartheid policies. 48 With her comrades in FEDSAW, Joseph incited more powerful, multiracial activism.

On October 27, 1955 , two thousand women followed the symbolic quartet of Joseph, ANCWL president Lilian Ngoyi, Coloured People’s Congress activist Sophie Williams, and the heavily pregnant South African Indian Congress activist Rahima Moosa, bearing petitions to leave for cabinet ministers. On August 9, 1956 , a day now celebrated as Women’s Day, twenty thousand women marched with FEDSAW on the Union Buildings, coming from as far away as Cape Town, and leaving thick stacks of individual petitions protesting the extension of passes to women on the doorstep of the prime minister’s office. 49 The women, many with children, sang the ANC’s anthem and taunting anti-apartheid songs, then gathered for a half hour of stunning silence, richly documented by journalists and photographers. Such iconic activism delayed implementation of pass laws for women until 1963 , but it also led to deepening state repression against FEDSAW activists that made the organization effectively moribund by the early 1960s.

FEDSAW members struggled not only with divisions among anti-apartheid women but also with struggles between these women and officials. They also confronted tensions with anti-apartheid men—tensions amplified by the ANC’s dominance in the Congress Alliance. Men had consistently served as ANC presidents from its 1912 founding, even though women had been full members of the ANC and leaders of the ANCWL since 1943 . Significantly, as scholar Shireen Hassim has described, the early ANC “was a political family and it replicated the hierarchical form of a patriarchal institution.” 50 The ANCWL’s founding president, Madie Hall Xuma, was the wife of the ANC’s president, Dr. A. B. Xuma. The National Executive Committee (NEC) was all male prior to Lilian Ngoyi’s election to it in late 1956 , recognizing her impressive work in FEDSAW. The NEC mediated between the party’s membership and the state, while the ANCWL focused on the everyday social and economic needs of its membership; both oversaw the ANC Youth League, which pushed party elders leftward. Women in both the Youth League and Women’s League often chafed against the restrictions of male party leaders, who encouraged women to engage in educational campaigns rather than confronting authorities with further protests after 1956 . 51 Men’s attitudes reflected both a protective impulse, and patriarchal assumptions that women should remain marginal to politics. 52 Above all, Congress Alliance men often failed to see women’s discussions of family issues that did not fit into the central activist platform as matters of politics. For instance, they responded to FEDSAW women’s discussions of family planning with what scholar Cherryl Walker has characterized as “jocular dismissal.” 53

Anti-apartheid men’s dismissal of women’s discussions of family planning was profoundly ironic, for two reasons. First, intimate issues of family were actually central to issues of apartheid governance, which hinged on control of racialized bodies and homes. Second, activist men relied upon women’s deft public rhetoric of motherhood to bring more activists into the anti-apartheid movement; they acknowledged anti-pass issues as central to the movement. 54 Yet most activists were no more ready for open discussions about real tensions of sexuality and family than were puritanical apartheid officials. Other matters of oppression loomed too large. Reticence about public discussion of sexuality applied to both male and female activists. Most had been raised in religiously conservative homes and schools where intimate matters were treated delicately, were Communists who saw gender issues as subordinate to class issues, or were both Communists and Christians. Anti-apartheid activists’ reliance on rallying familial discourses, but discomfort talking about family tensions that did not fit within the central anti-apartheid platform, would deepen with state repression in the 1960s and 1970s, as the need for activist discipline (already significant in the 1950s) grew.

Navigating the Personal and the Political, at the Height of the Anti-apartheid Movement

In April 1960 , officials banned the ANC and a rival organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), after women and men’s rising anti-pass activism and escalating police violence against protestors. From this point until February 1990 , the major liberation movements went underground, with key leaders in exile, imprisoned, repeatedly detained, or personally banned. All of these assaults on leaders were profoundly disruptive to family life. 55 Women lost organizational autonomy in the interest of streamlining underground operations: in 1969 , the ANCWL was replaced by the ANC Women’s Section, which Hassim describes as turning into “the movement’s social worker.” 56

Iconography of women and families played an integral role in an increasingly global anti-apartheid movement. This movement was shaped both by new armed wings of the ANC and PAC launched in 1961 , and by a transnational civil-societal campaign encouraging boycotts and diplomatic pressure on the apartheid regime that grew stronger after South Africa left the British Commonwealth in 1961 . Within South Africa, women’s social and cultural work fueled a new movement called Black Consciousness, rooted among students and workers across the country from the late 1960s. Black Consciousness activism would explode in a wave of student protests against Bantu Education in 1976 , which began in the Johannesburg township of Soweto but turned into a national schools boycott after police massacred student protestors. After 1976 , new waves of activists—especially youth—fled South Africa, and the country’s international pariah status worsened.

Women were a minority of armed combatants plotting sabotage from across South Africa’s borders, but both the iconography and presence of women has attracted attention—particularly from scholars of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, or Spear of the Nation). Conspicuous in MK’s propaganda were images of what scholar Kim Miller has called “moms with guns”: women with babies on their backs, weapons in hand, and fury in their eyes. 57 Female MK members could experience a thrilling sense of equality with men, particularly in cases where women held rank, and women performed critical roles smuggling weapons into South Africa. But women were also confronted with sexism and harassment from their comrades, the product of the very male-dominated atmosphere of MK camps.

Most troubling for many MK women were the ANC’s policies on pregnancy and childrearing, which reflect the essential contradictions between discourses and realities of family in the anti-apartheid struggle. Pregnancy was supposed to be forbidden for MK women, with some forcibly fitted with IUDs. MK women did inevitably become pregnant, however, especially after new waves of young activists flocked into MK camps from 1976 , and as the camps faced prolonged periods of minimal activity, plotting and training for many military expeditions that never occurred. Pregnant women would be sent to the ANC’s Charlotte Maxeke Mother and Child Centre in Morogoro, Tanzania—which they understood as a punishment, as this remote exile-within-exile took them away from camps in the frontline states. By the late 1980s, the Women’s Section complained to the party officials of years of demanding day-care facilities near MK camps so that women could be mothers while preparing as soldiers, without result: “We seem to travel in a dead end street with marriage and babies being at the end of the street. There is not and can never be a contradiction between marriage and having babies on one hand and fighting on the other.” 58 Yet MK women could only be “moms with guns” in propaganda.

Women had more space in the cultural wings of the global anti-apartheid movement, as ANC president O. R. Tambo particularly supported the deployment of eloquent and engaging women in exile: women were central to the Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble in London, and Barbara Masekela led the ANC’s Arts and Culture wing in the 1980s, for instance. South Africa’s most prolific, globally influential anti-apartheid novelist was a middle-class white woman in suburban Johannesburg, Nadine Gordimer. Black woman artists in exile, like Miriam Makeba and Lauretta Ngcobo, generated support for the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and Europe.

Within South Africa, educational institutions became important sites for young women’s anti-apartheid thought and organizing. Inanda Seminary, a high school drawing some of the brightest African girls from around the country to its campus near Durban, was an especially lively site during the 1970s. There young women met visiting activists like Steve Biko, a radical medical student at the nearby University of Natal, and Fatima Meer, an Indian academic-activist based at that university. While black women remained severely underrepresented in higher education compared to black men or whites, black girls’ high school attendance was rising dramatically during the apartheid years, such that by the early 1980s more black girls than black boys would be in high school. This was an outcome of apartheid policies promoting the education of black female teachers and nurses to work in new Bantustan schools and clinics, as officials saw women as both cheaper to employ and more politically tractable. 59 As the cases of banned activists setting up politically vibrant rural clinics make clear, women’s work in social professions could give them an entrée to anti-apartheid organizing. Such work could be particularly politicizing as women were confronted directly with apartheid’s violence, especially in clinics and social work. 60

The Black Consciousness (BC) movement, while helmed by men like Steve Biko, was undergirded by the work of young women in clinics, schools, and journalism, working to unite black women and men—African, Indian, and Coloured—to end apartheid. 61 Yet women in BC, like women in the liberation movements in exile, ran up against frustrating gendered limitations. As Mamphela Ramphele notes of her time as a leader in the South African Students’ Organisation, the key BC group until its 1977 banning: “I became quite an aggressive debater and was known for not suffering fools gladly. Moreover, I intimidated men who did not expect aggression from women. Soon a group of similarly inclined women, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Nomsisi Kraai, Deborah Matshoba and Thenjiwe Mthintso, became a force to be reckoned with at annual SASO meetings. Ours was not a feminist cause at that time—feminism was a later development in my political consciousness—but an insistence on being taken seriously as activists in our own right amongst our peers.” 62 Attempts at organizing BC women, such as Fatima Meer and Winnie Mandela’s Black Women’s Federation in 1975 , similarly attempted to develop women’s self-assertion while shying away from the label “feminism.” 63

Hassim’s Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa has most vividly shown how often anti-apartheid activists—particularly women of color—resisted calling themselves feminists, or discussing issues of gender inequity within their movements in public from the 1970s. It was not only that feminism was often rejected as an imported, “white” ideology without indigenous roots. That critique reflected the overrepresentation of white academics in South Africa’s second-wave feminist groups, the dramatic differences between the conditions of white and black women’s lives, and global moves of African American and “Third World” women toward less individualistic ideologies like “womanism.” As state oppression grew more pervasive in the 1980s—with prolonged “states of emergency” of military rule by mid-decade—feminism could seem a divisive distraction that activists should not indulge.

Yet Hassim has also shown how individual women’s connections of their experiences with those of other women could lead them, like Mamphele, to feminist consciousness. This happened as women grew involved in a resurgent wave of grassroots organizations—called township “civics”—as part of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a new, aboveground coalition of anti-apartheid groups stressing non-racialism and democracy from 1983 . Three major regional women’s groups formed: the United Women’s Organisation in the Western Cape (UWO), the Federation of Transvaal Women (FEDTRAW), and the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW). These groups were inspired by FEDSAW, which ANC activists were then trying to reestablish within South Africa. An emerging challenge facing women in these movements was how to connect personal issues with the political system that shaped them and that they shaped—against many activist men and women’s tendencies to sublimate intimate issues. Activist Phumelele Ntombela-Nzimande recalled, “NOW comrades were asking, ‘Why write about rape all the time?’ These were seen as weird issues to focus on. They said people should speak about the state of emergency, not about wife battering . . . Even I don’t remember once challenging a NOW meeting to speak about these issues. I just felt overwhelmed by the fact that it wasn’t appropriate.” 64 In Natal in particular, the brewing civil war between UDF activists and the Zulu nationalist group Inkatha (sponsored by the apartheid government) put discussion of such issues on the backburner for many activists in the 1980s. But growing sexual violence was a significant part of Natal’s political violence, laying the groundwork for the province’s high rates of HIV/AIDS after the democratic transition.

Throughout the anti-apartheid struggle, women were routinely underestimated and ignored as political actors. Officials’ underestimation of women could open up valuable political space. Women running politically lively clinics and schools, for instance, were not seen as threatening, while male-led political groups attracted more censure. 65 Yet the neglect of core issues of gendered inequality as apolitical—by many male and female activists—left lingering contradictions after apartheid’s end. The democratic transition in 1994 was in some respects remarkably progressive on gender and sexuality, with a constitution enshrining equality and unprecedented rights for LGBTQ citizens; but ANC leaders’ compromises with chiefs meant that women living under customary law could not realize this equality. Moreover, everyday gendered inequities—in issues from employment, to pervasive sexual violence—plague post-apartheid society. While South African women undermined apartheid from its gendered core, they have yet to realize core rights of gendered citizenship.

Discussion of the Literature

Work in this field began to emerge in the 1980s. Scholars, many of whom were also activists, began to develop an anti-apartheid feminism that acknowledged the harm done by a national liberation movement that could not fully grapple with gendered oppression during its long struggle. Marxism was influential in this early work. Scholars working during the late apartheid years were therefore concerned with (1) how gendered oppression had been integral to the racial capitalism that anti-apartheid activists were fighting, and (2) how feminism and nationalism were linked. The second theme will be explored in detail here, as it has recently been attracting more attention from a new wave of scholars.

On the first point, Belinda Bozzoli’s 1983 essay, “Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies,” examined the “patchwork quilt of patriarchies” through which the migrant labor system foundational to apartheid had developed. 66 Probing gendered histories of domestic service, factory work, nursing, and mining followed. 67

Walker’s Women and Resistance in South Africa , first published in 1982 with a second edition in 1991 , was the germinal study connecting the gendered foundations of apartheid rule with women’s development of strategies of collective resistance. The book emerged from Walker’s University of Cape Town thesis, drawing upon archives, activist memoirs, and interviews about the Federation of South African Women. But it also offers a deeper history of women’s urban migration, rural struggles, and links with male-led organizations, extending far beyond FEDSAW. Walker raised two central questions that shaped subsequent scholarship. First was the question of how apartheid-era South African women’s organizing was both emboldened and constrained by the movement for national liberation out of which it emerged. Second was the question of how, why, and to what consequences motherhood has united South African women.

In the first edition, Walker contended that both FEDSAW women’s lack of organizational autonomy and tendency to unite as mothers limited their feminism, seeing women as bound to both patriarchal politics and patriarchal homes. In the preface to the second edition, she backed away from seeing maternal appeals as primarily conservative, following pointed critiques of this approach as reductive and predicated on Western understandings of family life as a refuge from the public sphere. Hassim’s 2006 Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority pursued the question of women’s organizational autonomy more fully, extending her examination to the ANC in exile, women’s grassroots organizations in the 1980s, and the democratic transition. Like Walker, Hassim adjudged that the subordination of South African women’s organizations to the increasingly pressing needs of its national liberation movement ultimately constrained the gender-transformational potential of the democratic transition.

Nomboniso Gasa’s essay on 1950s women’s organizing in her 2007 edited volume, Women in South African History , challenged the theoretical premises of both of Walker’s central questions, as well as Julia Wells’s maintenance of the position that the “motherist” politics driving anti-pass protests were fundamentally conservative. 68 “At the heart of the earlier struggles is the fact that African women were homeless by state design,” Gasa argued. “Their struggle against the pass laws, which were a tangible way of infringing their rights, was, in fact a struggle to be in the public domain at the same time as a struggle for free movement.” 69 Building on Gasa’s intervention—and on the questions about motherhood Walker posited in her own auto-critique—scholars have begun to address the histories of motherhood in southern Africa that gave maternal politics very different meanings for black and white women, and to examine how family tensions played out politically during the liberation struggle. 70

The most important counterpoint to Walker’s and Hassim’s argument that female activists’ lack of autonomy from that national liberation movement limited their feminism remains Zine Magubane’s extensive 2010 essay, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990 : A Theoretical Re-interpretation,” in the Road to Democracy series. Revisiting Walker’s and Hassim’s sources and examining additional interviews, activist memoirs, and archives of FEDSAW and the ANC, Magubane argues that autonomy was not a viable option: groups like FEDSAW derived strength from their roots in political groups and trade unions. 71 Further, she contends that black women’s emphasis on motherhood did not entrench patriarchy, but rather asserted black women’s moral leadership over white women in a growing popular struggle. Drawing on women’s own conceptions of their activism, she shows how political motherhood in FEDSAW, and in subsequent movements influenced by FEDSAW, was an ideology rooted in black women’s experiences of not only caring for their own children, but also taking community leadership roles on the basis of their maternal authority. 72 New scholarship is only beginning to grapple with the challenges and opportunities that transformations in the political meanings and everyday experiences of family brought to women, and to men, during apartheid and in the transition to democracy. 73

Primary Sources

National and provincial archives, with a searchable online database , contain information on both foundational gendered legislation and protests against key policies such as pass laws. The most revealing archives document anti-apartheid resistance, however. Compared to anti-apartheid men, relatively few women have extensive personal archives. The University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers do contain some (such as those of Helen Joseph, Lilian Ngoyi, and Hilda Bernstein of FEDSAW) and FEDSAW’s organizational archives; key sources, including the FEDSAW papers, have been digitized . Other major collections include the ANCWL papers housed at the Mayibuye Archive , at the University of the Western Cape, and the central ANC Archives at the University of Fort Hare; both of these collections regrettably lack complete, searchable online databases at the time of writing. Campbell Collections at the University of KwaZulu-Natal contains archives for women’s organizations such as the Natal Organization of Women. Many women have published memoirs of their anti-apartheid activism and imprisonment, 74 and extensive oral histories have been collected on women’s experiences of exile. 75 Prominent women have also authored collections of essays and creative writing reflecting critically on the apartheid years. 76 Other published primary sources include Shula Marks’ collection of letters between a troubled schoolgirl and her benefactors in apartheid’s early years, and an anthology of regional writing. 77 Key feminist anti-apartheid periodicals may be found in JSTOR’s Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa collection.

The Role of South African Women in Fighting Against the Violation of Human Rights from 1950 to 1960

The Role of South African Women in Fighting Against the Violation of Human Rights from 1950 to 1960: South Africa in the 1950s was marked by the implementation of apartheid laws, which enforced racial segregation and discrimination against black and non-white South Africans. The government was also repressive and authoritarian, curtailing civil liberties and suppressing any dissenting voices. In this environment, the role of women in the struggle for human rights was crucial.

Women’s organizations, resistance movements, protests, and international solidarity networks were all important components of the struggle against apartheid.

Below, we will examine the role of South African women in fighting against the violation of human rights from 1950 to 1960.

Women’s Organizations Against the Violation of Human Rights

Women’s organizations played an essential role in the struggle for human rights in South Africa in the 1950s. Women established these organizations to fight against the discriminatory laws and policies of the apartheid government.

Some of the key organizations included the Black Sash , the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) , and the Women’s Defence of the Constitution League. The Black Sash, founded in 1955, was a white women’s organization that opposed apartheid and campaigned for human rights. The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), established in 1954, was an organization of black women that aimed to improve the status of women and fight against the oppressive laws of apartheid. The Women’s Defence of the Constitution League, formed in 1956, was a multiracial women’s organization that opposed the introduction of laws that would restrict civil liberties.

List of Women’s Organizations Against the Violation of Human Rights from 1950 – 1960s

Here is a list of Women’s Organizations Against the Violation of Human Rights from 1950-1960s, organized by years:

The African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) : The ANCWL was established in 1948 as the women’s wing of the African National Congress (ANC). Its main objective was to fight against apartheid and promote the rights of women in South Africa.
The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW): FEDSAW was established in 1954 as an organization of black women to campaign against the oppressive laws of apartheid and to improve the status of women in South Africa.
The Black Sash: The Black Sash was founded in 1955 as a white women’s organization that opposed apartheid and campaigned for human rights. Its members wore black sashes as a symbol of mourning for the loss of human rights in South Africa.
The Women’s Defence of the Constitution League: The Women’s Defence of the Constitution League was formed in 1955 as a multiracial women’s organization that opposed the introduction of laws that would restrict civil liberties.
The Women’s March: The Women’s March was a historic event that took place in 1956. Women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against the Pass Laws, which required black South Africans to carry a passbook at all times.
The National Council of Women (NCW): The NCW was established in 1894 but became involved in the struggle against apartheid in the 1950s. The organization campaigned for the rights of women and against discriminatory laws and policies.

These are just a few examples of women’s organizations that were active in the struggle for human rights in South Africa from 1950-1960s. Many more women’s organizations were established during this time period, and their contributions to the fight against apartheid cannot be overstated.

Resistance Movements

Women were active participants in resistance movements against apartheid. They engaged in various forms of resistance, such as boycotts, demonstrations, and civil disobedience.

Women organized rent strikes and bus boycotts, which were effective in challenging the apartheid government’s policies. They also participated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, which involved mass civil disobedience against unjust laws. The Women’s March of 1956 was a significant event in the resistance movement, where women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against the Pass Laws, which required black South Africans to carry a passbook at all times.

Women’s Protests

Women’s protests were also crucial in challenging the apartheid government’s policies. Women protested against discriminatory laws and policies, such as the Pass Laws, the Group Areas Act, and the Bantu Education Act.

In 1955, the Women’s Charter was adopted by FEDSAW, which called for equal rights for women and non-racialism. Women also protested against forced removals and the destruction of their homes and communities.

Women’s Imprisonment

Women activists faced arrest and imprisonment for their resistance against apartheid. They were often subjected to brutal treatment, including torture and solitary confinement. Some of the well-known women activists who were imprisoned during this period included Winnie Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, and Lilian Ngoyi. The conditions in prisons were harsh, and women were often subjected to poor hygiene, overcrowding, and limited access to medical care. However, their imprisonment did not deter them from continuing the struggle for human rights.

List of Examples of Women who were Arrested Fighting Against the Violation of Human Rights from 1950 to 1960

Many women were arrested during the struggle for human rights in South Africa from 1950 to 1960. Here is a list of some of the most prominent women who were arrested during this period:

Winnie Mandela : Winnie Mandela was a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was arrested and imprisoned multiple times in the 1950s and 1960s. She was subjected to solitary confinement and other forms of mistreatment while in prison.
Albertina Sisulu : Albertina Sisulu was a leader of the ANC Women’s League and was arrested multiple times for her activism against apartheid.
Lilian Ngoyi : Lilian Ngoyi was a leader of the Federation of South African Women and played a key role in organizing the Women’s March in 1956. She was arrested and imprisoned for her activism.
Ruth First : Ruth First was a journalist and anti-apartheid activist who was arrested in 1963 and imprisoned for over a year. She was later exiled from South Africa.
Adelaide Tambo : Adelaide Tambo was a leader of the ANC Women’s League and was arrested and imprisoned multiple times for her activism.
Dorothy Nyembe : Dorothy Nyembe was a leader of the ANC Women’s League and was arrested and imprisoned multiple times for her activism.
Helen Joseph: Helen Joseph was a white anti-apartheid activist who was arrested and imprisoned multiple times for her activism. She was also subjected to house arrest and banned from political activity.

These women and many others were instrumental in the struggle for human rights in South Africa and their bravery and sacrifice continue to inspire people around the world today.

Women’s International Solidarity

International solidarity networks were also essential in the struggle for human rights in South Africa. Women played a significant role in establishing and participating in these networks. Women’s organizations in South Africa established links with women’s organizations in other countries, such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the World YWCA. Women also participated in international conferences and events, such as the Women’s World Congress in Copenhagen in 1953 and the Women’s International Peace Conference in Paris in 1956.

The role of South African women in fighting against the violation of human rights from 1950 to 1960 was significant. Women’s organizations, resistance movements, protests, imprisonment, and international solidarity networks were all important components of the struggle against apartheid. Women activists were at the forefront of challenging discriminatory laws and policies, and their contributions cannot be overstated.

The importance of the role of women in the struggle for human rights has implications for current and future struggles for human rights. It highlights the need for women’s voices to be heard and recognized in the fight against oppression and discrimination. It also underscores the importance of solidarity and collaboration in achieving meaningful change.

In conclusion, the role of South African women in fighting against the violation of human rights from 1950 to 1960 was vital in challenging apartheid and promoting human rights. Their legacy continues to inspire and motivate people around the world to fight for justice and equality.

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The turbulent 1950s - Women as defiant activists

In the 1950s the government's increasingly repressive policies began to pose a direct threat to all people of colour, and there was a surge of mass political action by blacks in defiant response. The 1950s certainly proved to be a turbulent decade. We shall see that women were prominent in virtually all these avenues of protest, but to none were they more committed than the anti-pass campaign.

Women and the anti-pass campaign 1950-1953

The apartheid regime's influx control measures and pass laws were what women feared the most and reacted to most vehemently. Their fears were not unfounded. In 1952 the Native Laws Amendment Act tightened influx control, making it an offence for any African (including women) to be in any urban area for more than 72 hours unless in possession of the necessary documentation. The only women who could live legally in the townships were the wives and unmarried daughters of the African men who were eligible for permanent residence.

In the same year the Natives Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act was passed. In terms of this act the many different documents African men had been required to carry were replaced by a single one - the reference book - which gave details of the holder's identity, employment, place of legal residence, payment of taxes, and, if applicable, permission to be in the urban areas. The act further stipulated that African women, at an unspecified date in the near future, would for the first time be required to carry reference books. Women were enraged by this direct threat to their freedom of movement and their anti-pass campaign, as Walker puts it ‘was one of the most vociferous and effective protest campaigns of any at the time' (1991:125).

Protests started as early as 1950 when rumours of the new legislation were leaked in the press. Meetings and demonstrations were held in a number of centres including Langa, Uitenhage, East London, Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. In the Durban protests in March 1950, Bertha Mkize of the African National Congress Womens League (ANCWL) was a leading figure, while in Port Elizabeth Florence Matomela (the provincial president of the ANCWL) led a demonstration in which passes were burnt. By 1953 there were still sporadic demonstrations taking place and these accelerated when local officials began to enforce the new pass regulations. Reaction was swift and hostile. On 4 January 1953, hundreds of African men and women assembled in the Langa township outside Cape Town to protest against the new laws. Delivering a fiery speech to the crowd Dora Tamana , a member of the ANC Women's League and later a founding member of the Federation of South African Women (FSAW), declared:

We women will never carry these passes. This is something that touches my heart. I appeal to you young Africans to come forward and fight. These passes make the road even narrower for us. We have seen unemployment, lack of accommodation and families broken because of passes. We have seen it with our men. Who will look after our children when we go to jail for a small technical offence - not having a pass ?

The Defiance Campaign is launched and women step forward

violation of human rights from 1950 to 1960 essay pdf

In June 1952 the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Indian Congress (SAIC) initiated a cooperative initiative known as the Defiance Campaign . Radical tactics of defiance were to be employed to exert pressure on the government. This was in line with the ANC's declared ‘ Programme of Action' of 1949. Volunteers from the ANC and SAIC (the Communist Party of South Africa [CPSA] had disbanded in 1950) began to publicly defy discriminatory laws and invite arrest, filling the jails and over-extending the judicial system.

Women were prominent in many of these defiant incidents. Florence Matomela was among 35 activists arrested in Port Elizabeth and Bibi Dawood recruited 800 volunteers in Worcester. Fatima Meer , an Indian woman, was arrested for her role in the unrest and was subsequently banned. Another woman to come to the fore during the Defiance Campaign was Lilian Ngoyi , who later became president of both the ANCWL and FSAW. She had previously kept a very low profile and been involved in church-related organisations, but the Defiance Campaign made her realise that only by adopting a more aggressive and militant approach would the government be fully aware of the commitment of women to the national struggle for freedom. Women's involvement in the Defiance Campaign certainly proved to be an important stimulus in their political development across the board. It not only strengthened the ANCWL but also motivated women to establish the FSAW.

The Federation of South African Women (FSAW or FEDSAW)

Three important female activists were in Port Elizabeth in April 1953 at the time when the Defiance Campaign was underway and there was widespread political unrest in the region. Influx control measures had just been implemented in the region a few months before and had created a storm of protest from the people. The three women were Florence Matomela (eastern Cape president of the ANCWL), Frances Baard , who was a leading local figure in the Food and Canning Worker's Union (FCWU) and Ray Alexander , the general secretary of the FCWU, who was in Port Elizabeth to attend a trade union conference. The three decided among themselves that the time was right to call women to a meeting to discuss the formation of a national women's organisation. No record was kept of the informal meeting held that same evening, but Ray Alexander later said that it had been attended by about 40 women. Other than Alexander, a Mrs Pillay, a Miss Damons and Gus Coe, most of the women were Africans. Although from various different organisations all the women were committed to the Congress Alliance and the Defiance Campaign that had been initiated the previous year. Ray Alexander pointed out the advantages of an umbrella body that would devise a national strategy to fight against the issues of importance to women: every-day matters such as rising food and transport costs, passes and influx control. The women were enthusiastic in their response and Ray Alexander was asked to pursue the matter further.

Ray Alexander was based in Cape Town so the planning for the initial conference was done there. Hilda Watts (Bernstein), also a communist and an experienced political campaigner, was asked to handle the Johannesburg wing of the committee. Subsequently Johannesburg and Cape Town were to become the main FSAW centres. An energetic, skilled organiser who had been a tireless campaigner for women's rights since the 1930s, Ray Alexander was the ideal woman for the job. She co-opted a number of influential women country-wide to help her but her individual contribution was enormous. All the major organisations were represented in her ‘women's committee' including the ANC Women's Leaguers, trade unionists, members of the SAIC, of the Transvaal All-Women's Union and of the Congress of Democrats (COD). The COD had been formed when the CPSA had disbanded in 1950; it thus included many of the ex-Communist Party members.

The committee met regularly to plan the coming conference. Other notable women involved were Ida Mtwana (ANC Women's League), Josie Palmer (ex-CPSA and Transvaal All-Women's Union), Helen Joseph (COD), Amina Cachalia and Mrs M Naidoo (SAIC) and three trade unionists: Bettie du Toit , Lucy Mvubelo and Hetty du Preez. Ray Alexander also went to Durban to coordinate plans with women in Natal, where Dr K Goonam , Fatima Meer and Fatima Seedat of the SAIC and Bertha Mkize and Henrietta Ostrich of the ANC, were consulted for their views. Invitations to the inaugural conference of the FSAW were sent out in March 1954, signed by 63 women who supported the aims of the Congress Alliance.

The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW or FSAW) was launched on 17 April 1954 in the Trades Hall in Johannesburg, and was the first attempt to establish a national, broad-based women's organisation. One hundred and forty-six delegates, representing 230,000 women from all parts of South Africa, attended the founding conference and pledged their support for the broadly-based objectives of the Congress Alliance. The specific aims of FSAW were to bring the women of South Africa together to secure full equality of opportunity for all women, regardless of race, colour or creed, as well as to remove their social, legal and economic disabilities.

A draft Women's Charter was presented by Hilda Bernstein, and in complete identification with the national liberation movement as represented by the Congress Alliance, the Women's Charter called for the enfranchisement of men and women of all races; for equality of opportunity in employment; equal pay for equal work; equal rights in relation to property, marriage and children; and the removal of all laws and customs that denied women such equality. It further demanded paid maternity leave, childcare for working mothers, and free and compulsory education for all South African children. These demands were later incorporated into the Freedom Charter that was adopted by the Congress of the People , held in Kliptown near Johannesburg, from 25-26 June 1955.

The administrative groundwork of the newly-established FSAW evolved over the months that followed, but a national executive committee was formed at the inaugural conference in April 1954. Ida Mtwana was elected as national president (she was also the presiding ANCWL president), which indicated the key role the ANC (the senior partner of the Democratic Alliance) was destined to play in the new organisation. Ray Alexander became the national secretary and the vice presidents were Gladys Smith, Lilian Ngoyi, Bertha Mkize and Florence Matomela.

The women were unanimous in their opinion that the inaugural conference had been an unqualified success. On Hilda Watts' suggestion men volunteers had been assigned the catering responsibilities for the conference. This was symbolic. As Ida Mtwana put it: ‘Gone are the days when the place of women was in the kitchen and looking after the children. Today they are marching side by side with men in the road to freedom' ( Walker 1991:154).

Women's role in the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter

By the time the FSAW had been established in 1954 the Defiance Campaign had fizzled out. This is not to say that it had failed, despite it shortcomings. However, the government had weathered the defiance and was introducing yet more of its apartheid measures with persistent vigour. It became clear that the national liberation movement needed to adopt a new initiative. The Congress Alliance began to organise the Congress of the People; once again women were destined to play an important role. This despite the fact that many of the leading women activists in the ANCWL and FSAW including Ray Alexander, were banned and had to cut their ties with the organisation.

In August 1954 the Congress Alliance asked the FSAW to assist in organising the Congress of the People and the women agreed with enthusiasm. They were to help organise local bodies and recruit new grassroots support for the Alliance by holding house meetings and local conferences. This they did with great success in the opening months of 1955. In addition they took on the huge task of arranging accommodation for the more than 2 000 expected delegates. Their input gave the women an opportunity to lobby for the incorporation of some of their demands into the Freedom Charter adopted at the mass meeting.

Walker (1991:183) shows that although the FSAW was closely involved in the planning of the Congress of the People, women only played a limited role in the actual meeting. On 25-26 June 1955 nearly 3 000 delegates gathered at Kliptown. There were 721 women delegates in the official tally of 2 848 – in other words only about a quarter of the delegates at the Congress of the People were women. There were a few women, including Sonia Bunting , who spoke from the floor, but Helen Joseph, who was the FSAW's Transvaal secretary, was the only female platform speaker. The clause that she proposed on behalf of women, that of the need for ‘houses, security and comfort', including free medical treatment for mothers and young children, was in fact subsequently included in the Freedom Charter. Frances Baard, a prominent trade unionist and member of the executive committee of the FSAW, was involved in the compilation of the Freedom Charter.

In September 1955 the protest against the imposition of passes for women became the primary concern for the ANCWL and the FSAW but for black women across the board. This anti-pass campaign peaked with a massive demonstration of ‘women's power' in August 1956. After the Pretoria march the campaign continued until the end of the 1950s, within Zeerust in 1957, Johannesburg in 1958 and Natal in 1959. In 1960, as will be seen, FSAW's plans were abruptly halted in the wake of the Sharpeville unrest when the government banned the ANC. FSAW had been dealt a severe blow.

In December 1956 several female activists were involved in another high profile incident. In a determined effort to try to curtail the national liberation movement, the government rounded up and arrested 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance. Among those detained were leading women such as Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Annie Silinga and Francis Baard. They were accused of plotting to overthrow the government, and were tried in the infamous Treason Trial that lasted for four and a half years. During this protracted period women of the FSAW and ANCWL helped to organise support for the treason trialists and their families.

The women's 1955 anti-pass campaign

In September 1955 the issue of passes burst into the public eye again when the government announced that it would start issuing reference books to black women from January 1956. Women, now politicised and well-organised into a powerful resistance movement, immediately rose to the challenge. No longer were they merely regarded as mothers, bound to the home; they were independent and assertive adult South Africans. Passes threatened their basic rights of freedom and family life and they were going to resist them with everything they had. They were unequivocal in their message to the government: We shall not rest until ALL pass laws and all forms of permits restricting our freedoms have been abolished. We shall not rest until we have won for our children their fundamental rights of freedom, justice and security.

As Walker puts it, the anti-pass protests by women in the 1950s were a good indication that they had thrown off the shackles of the past. The demonstrations that the women launched were, in her view, ‘probably the most successful and militant of any resistance campaign mounted at that time' . She sees them as the ‘political highpoint of 1956, not only for the women who took part but for the entire Congress Alliance' (Walker 1991).

The Federation of South African Women (FSAW) that had been formed the previous year was beginning to assert itself by 1955. It was by now an accepted organisation within the ambit of the Congress Alliance; regional branches had been set up and mass membership was growing throughout the country. Furthermore, it had links with other major women's organisations including the powerful ANC Women's League (ANCWL). A march to Pretoria to present women's grievances had been mooted in August 1955, and when the pass issue came to the fore in September the scale and urgency of the demonstration increased dramatically.

The demonstration took place on 27 October 1955, and was a great success. This was despite organisational difficulties – including police intimidation, and the banning of Josie Palmer, one of the main organisers, a week before the date of the gathering. Furthermore, in addition to police action, the government had been as obstructionist as it could. The then Minister of Native Affairs, HF Verwoerd , under whose jurisdiction the pass laws fell, pointedly refused to receive any multiracial delegation. Pretoria City Council refused the women permission to hold the meeting and saw to it that public transport was stalled to make it difficult for the women to get to the Pretoria venue. Private transport had to be arranged and evasive tactics adopted for a multitude of other obstructionist measures launched by the authorities. In the circumstances it was surprising, and very gratifying to the organisers that a crowd of between 1 000 and 2 000 women gathered in the grounds of the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Although the majority were African women, White, Coloured and Indian women also attended. The crowd, most of whom came from the Rand towns, was orderly and dignified throughout the proceedings. They handed their bundles of signed petitions to Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophie Williams , the main organisers, who deposited them at the ministers' office doors. In the aftermath of the demonstration the government tried to downplay its influence by alleging (erroneously) that the meeting had only been successful because the organisation had been in the hands of white women. That black women of the FSAW and ANCWL had in fact played a central role was evident when a few months later Lilian Ngoyi became the first woman to be elected to the national executive of the ANC (Walker 1991).

Preparations for the 1956 Women's March

The success of the October 1955 gathering was highly motivating and buoyed up the women to capitalise on their success. From 1955 onwards, the pass issue became the single, most important focus of their militancy. The ANC, as the major anti-government party identified itself closely with the campaign reiterating that the pass struggle ‘was not one for women alone, but for all African people'. However, at its annual conference in 1955, it did not appear to have a specific strategy in mind. In marked contrast the FSAW immediately set about working on a plan of meetings, demonstrations, and local initiatives. The women, carried along by a mass-following of females countrywide, recognised the authority of the ANC but were not prepared to delay their own preparations.

Meetings held across the country on the anti-pass ticket proved to be remarkably successful, and were attended by huge crowds. Meetings in Free State towns in late 1955 and in Port Elizabeth in January 1956, Johannesburg in March 1956 and those in Durban, East London Cape Town and Germiston all went off well. The mood was militant, with Annie Silinga declaring: ‘we women are prepared to fight these passes until victory is ours' ( Walker 1991:191).

In reply the government threatened reprisals, but when it finally began issuing reference books it did so unobtrusively, starting in white agricultural areas and smaller towns, choosing Winburg in the Free State, where FSAW presence was minimal and the women were not well-informed. Here, on 22 March 1956, they issued 1 429 black women with reference books and met with little reaction. Senior ANC officials were thereupon designated to go to Winburg immediately and Lilian Ngoyi and several men arrived in the town the next week and addressed the women. Inspired by the presence of Ngoyi, who was an excellent orator, the local women defiantly marched into town and publicly burnt their new reference books outside the magistrate's office. The authorities reacted swiftly; the offenders were arrested and charged. Subsequently it was reported that their monthly pensions would not be paid to them unless they could produce their reference books. Again there was a wave of protest from all parts of the country, and anti-pass demonstrations were held in 38 different venues.

The authorities continued to send out their units to issue the hated reference books. It was unwelcome news to the FSAW organisers that the government was persevering and that by September 1956 it had visited 37 small centres and succeeded in issuing 23 000 books. Although none of the major ANC strongholds had been visited and women throughout the country were in militant mood, it was clear that drastic action would have to be taken; and fast. It decided to organise another massive march to Pretoria. This time women would come from all parts of the country, not just the Rand. They vowed that the prime minister, JG Strijdom , would be left in no doubt about how the women felt about having to carry passes.

The organisation of this event was to culminate in the 1956 Women’s March .

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