| Gender equality
the litmus test for social change
This week
our publication date coincides with National Women's Day. This year this
important national public holiday assumes special significance because
on this day we will be laying to rest the remains of Sarah Baartman. We
commented on this important matter in an earlier Letter. We must also
celebrate the triumph of the outstanding athlete, Natalie du Toit.
We extend to the women of our country the congratulations
and best wishes of our people as a whole. As we all join in celebration
of Women's Day, we should also refocus on the task ahead of us of advancing
the agenda for the emancipation of women.
By succeeding to include the objective of the creation
of a non-sexist society in our national constitution, we ensured that
democratic South Africa as a whole commits itself to the centrally important
goal of gender equality. Accordingly, all of us have work to do to realise
this objective.
During the course of our struggle against the apartheid
system, correctly, we said that the emancipation of women was a defining
feature of our democratic revolution. We said that a true democracy had
to guarantee us our national emancipation and national equality, as well
women's emancipation and gender equality.
We pointed to the centrality of the struggle for gender
equality by drawing attention to the triple oppression of women in our
country. Again correctly, we said that the majority of the women of South
Africa are oppressed and exploited on the basis of race, class and gender.
This triple burden defined them as the worst affected by the oppressive
apartheid system, more than their male counterparts.
The progress we make in the genuine emancipation of
the women of our country should therefore serve as a litmus test of the
advance we are making towards fundamental social transformation. Failure
to move forward towards gender equality can only mean that we are not
advancing significantly towards the creation of a new South Africa.
On the occasion of National Women's Day, we need to
say this proudly that, during the eight years of our liberation, we have
taken important strides forward towards the achievement of the objective
of the emancipation of women. This progress can be expressed in concrete
and measurable ways. The women of our country would themselves attest
to the advances that have been made.
Nevertheless, we must also make the point that in many
essential ways, it is still correct for us to say that our women continue
to suffer from triple oppression. The racial disparities of the past persist
and with them the continued suffering of those that suffered from colonial
and apartheid oppression.
As an important component part of the working people
of our country, the women of our country are also engaged in a continuous
struggle for a living wage, permanently to escape from the terrible condition
of poverty. The struggle for the eradication of poverty remains one of
the central tasks of our movement and society.
In many areas of our national life, the women of our
country continue to be discriminated against, whether as a result of historical
patriarchal relations, unequal relations at work, inadequate access to
education, skills and professions, and so on. Correctly, we have insisted
that the matter of the emancipation of women should be integrated in all
our activities because gender oppression and discrimination occur in virtually
all areas of social activity.
A disturbing element in our continuing struggle for
the emancipation of women is that we have not succeeded forcefully to
project within the national consciousness the objectives we pursue. To
some extent, the call for gender equality does not adequately express
the goals we have to pursue.
The emancipation of women must mean that we free the
women of our country from poverty. Among other things, this means that
our educational and human resource development programmes must pay particular
attention both to the girl child as well as young and older women. The
provision of skills required in the production of wealth and economic
activity in general, is fundamental to the achievement of the goal of
ensuring that the women have access to incomes on a sustained basis.
We must ensure that these human resource development
programmes are relevant to the developmental possibilities in the areas
in which the women live. For example, for a long period already, because
of the migrant labour system, women have constituted a larger proportion
of the adult population in the areas of subsistence agriculture. Our training
programmes must respond to this reality.
These areas therefore need both normal schools and facilities
for further education. Some of this further education should be conducted
directly at the places of economic activity. This would be true, for instance,
of extension services in agriculture. Furthermore, as these rural women
engage more and more in ordinary economic activities, the more pronounced
will be the need to provide the possibility for the care of children who
are still too young to attend normal school.
Again, we mention all these matters because they are
fundamental to the achievement of the goal of the emancipation of women.
Others that are of direct relevance to this matter are such issues as
women workers in commercial agriculture and the place of women in areas
that fall under traditional authorities.
In addition to the matter of skills, we must also work
to ensure that the women have the necessary resources, including access
to credit, to enable them to engage in productive economic activity.
All these emphasise the importance of ensuring that
the women in the countryside are freed from various burdens they have
always carried. The provision of clean water and sanitation, good nutrition,
health facilities and electricity, are therefore fundamental to the struggle
for the emancipation of women. So also are other elements of the infrastructure,
including roads and telecommunications.
Similar observations can be made with regard to women
in the urban areas. These would also include questions of equal access
to skills training, equal work for equal pay, attention to the situation
of domestic workers and adequate provision for maternity leave.
The all-round upliftment of the majority of the women
of our country means that we must focus especially on the development
and empowerment of the workingwomen. These constitute the overwhelming
majority of the women of our country. To ensure their gender emancipation
means that our society as a whole must work to free them from poverty
and underdevelopment, from ignorance, marginalisation and disempowerment.
Unless we achieve these goals, we cannot speak of the
emancipation of the women of South Africa. We have to work hard to promote
a proper understanding of this matter by our society as a whole.
Naturally, the matter does not end with our workingwomen.
It must also extend to other levels of social activity, including government,
business and the professions. Again, we come back to the matter of education,
training, human resource development and empowerment of women to create
the basis for the achievement of gender equality in these areas of human
endeavour.
Of equally great importance in this regard is the central
question of the access of women to decision-making centres of power. This
means that we have to engage in a conscious struggle against the entrenched
and reactionary concept that the woman's place is in the kitchen. As part
of that struggle, our society must make a deliberate effort to discriminate
in favour of women to enable them to join these centres of power.
This conscious intervention is necessitated by the fact
that it is natural that those who exercise power will seek both to maintain
themselves in power, and reproduce the power relations in which they have
an objective interest. They place themselves in the position in which
they can argue, forever, that those who are excluded from power do not
have the experience properly to discharge the responsibilities that derive
from the exercise of power, and should therefore be excluded.
Their social position obliges them to adopt conservative
rather than revolutionary positions. Only a revolutionary intervention
can succeed to break this mould that seeks to conserve the past and block
the introduction of the new. It is in this context that it is correct
that we set quotas to ensure that we actually advance towards gender equity
in terms of the decision-making processes in our society.
The important struggle we must continue to wage, to
end violence against women, is a critical part of the historic effort
to change the power relations in our society. Once more, the national,
class and gender oppression of women exposes them especially to the use
of force against them by those who dominate them, who have inherited a
backward social ideology that endows the oppression of women with the
attributes of a law of nature.
As fighters for the liberation of our country, we know
that we can only achieve the goals we have set ourselves for the emancipation
of women through struggle. I am certain that there are very few in our
country that would stand up and say they are opposed to the transformation
of South Africa into a non-sexist and a non-racist society.
Yet we know that those who benefited from racist rule
do not hesitate to oppose all practical measures to build a non-racist
society, including through such measures as affirmative action, the deracialisation
of the economy, the restructuring of property relations and the transformation
of the public service. The more we focus successfully on the central issue
of women's emancipation, the harder will be the resistance we will have
to confront. The struggle continues and must continue.
The return of Sarah Baartman to the land of her birth
is an affirmation of the humanity and dignity of the Khoi people and Africans
as a whole. It is an affirmation of the humanity and dignity of Khoi women
and African women as a whole. As we lay her to rest, we must make the
commitment that we will not allow that the black woman continues to be
used and abused by those intent on the perpetuation of the practice of
human inhumanity to other human beings.
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