Resist the elite capture of the feminist imagination

Women’s Day is increasingly marked in an anodyne way that masks the significance of the 1956 mass protest against the pass laws. Internationally, much the same thing has happened to Mother’s Day and International Women’s Day. Both have radical roots, but have become little more than another pit stop in the annual marketing calendar.

In a time when women from the global political and corporate elites, such as Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, have sought to don the mantle of feminist leadership, we need to hold fast to our history and resist the elite capture of the feminist imagination. We must remember the vital contributions women have made, not just in the fight for their rights, but in the struggle to build a society free of race, class or gender prejudice. One thinks of trade unionists such as Jabu Ndlovu and Emma Mashinini, and, of course, the great moments when women boldly took their place as political actors on the public stage. Writing immediately after the great 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings, communist intellectual Ruth First, one of our greatest journalists, wrote: "The silent protest was developed by the women themselves. With their dignity, their discipline and their determination, they had carried the day.”

This extraordinary event did not emerge from nowhere. Women had often taken the lead in struggles against pass laws, and women’s struggles against passes go back to 1894. In 1913, a year after the ANC was founded by men, women took to the streets of Bloemfontein in protest against passes. And while the 1956 march is rightly remembered, the women’s riots against the municipal beer-hall system in Durban in 1959 are seldom given their due. These, initially organised by women like Florence Mkhize and Dorothy Nyembe, who lived in shacks in Cato Manor, marked a new militancy in the national liberation struggle.

Despite the increased participation of women in politics at all levels, including in leadership, after the events of the 1950s, women therein continued to face all kinds of discrimination. The case of Winnie Mandela, who was held to different standards to men when she stepped out of the roles of mother and wife, is much discussed. But the issues confronted by women in political leadership are systemic, and they remain.

We all witnessed the gross ways in which women journalists like Karima Brown and Ferial Haffajee were publicly harassed, threatened and demeaned during the tail end of the Jacob Zuma years. But the sexism faced by women who enter the public sphere on their terms is also often driven by less public forms of attack, with gossip being a key weapon. The claim that a woman has attained a position in public life by sleeping with a powerful man, or men, is relentless. So too is the idea that women are not to be taken seriously as actors in their own right as they are only proxies for powerful men. All kinds of sexist tropes proliferate, with women seen as cunning, hysterical, unruly and so on. Having experienced this myself in the academy and the toxic world of the South African left, I know that while one doesn’t want to give the purveyors of sexist gossip any sense that their blows have landed, there is always a deep personal price to be paid.

Opposition to the mobilisation of sexist tropes as a weapon in political contestation needs to be established as a clear political principle, irrespective of who is targeted and why. But this does not mean feminist work should confine itself to public forms of sexism meted out against women who have taken independent positions in the public sphere. We must always recall that after apartheid, grassroots feminism was swiftly marginalised by bureaucratised and professionalised feminism often dominated by well-educated middle-class women. Of course, any feminist struggle needs advocates, professors, doctors, journalists and so on, but a democratic feminism needs to be embedded in and led by the struggles of working-class and poor women.

We need to be careful to not be seduced by the dominant paradigm of feminism and remain connected to our traditions of feminism, as well as the wonderfully generative and insightful international legacy of black radical feminism.

The 1956 women’s march was an event of global significance and it, and the popular struggles to come, placed women’s struggles in South Africa at the fore of global feminism. It was decades ahead of the curve of the dominant forms of white middle-class feminism in the global north. We have a proud history of popular black feminism and can look back, as well as forward, to a popular feminism rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary women.

Dr Vashna Jagarnath is a labour activist and historian