The Women's Struggle for Equality During South Africa's Transition to Democracy (Reflection‪)‬

Fifteen years ago, I published the above article in Transformation 30 (1996) in a context where some of the optimism about the prospects for change in South Africa's transition to democracy had already waned--at least among left wing feminist activists. The question I now ask when I read that article, is what was absent from the thinking that informed it. What and how was I thinking? I recall in the 1970s and 1980s, hot debates within the internal South African left about the relationship between nationalism and socialism. Among feminists, there was a deeper criticism that showed that neither approach would address the critical questions of women's subordination and women's oppression. I wondered in reading the piece I wrote, whether through my own enthusiastic and committed involvement in the transition to democracy, in the Women's National Coalition, whether I had forgotten about the left criticism of nationalist movements and their commitment not to revolutionary transformation so much as to the promotion of a nationalist bourgeoisie. If not forgotten, then placed carefully on the back-burner to simmer away and mature! What did this mean for working class and feminist politics and in particular, for the outcome in terms of fulfilling women's needs and interests? Left intellectuals had been critical of the idea of the two stage theory of revolution anyway, so why was there such euphoria when the ANC came to power in 1994? Was I naive enough to think that the ANC would be any different in 1992 than it had been in 1982 or earlier, when it attacked any deviation from its 'line' and forbad any internal criticism? As a left-leaning feminist intellectual, I had thought much about what it meant to support the struggle for liberation, and I and others on the left, had joined women's organisations during the 1980s to argue for what we conceived to be a transformative agenda. A transformative agenda invoked demands that were in some senses revolutionary--for women's autonomy in a society that was highly patriarchal, for a participatory model of politics that included the transformation of intimate family relationships in ways that domestic decision-making and roles would involve sharing housework, parenting and working life. A further aspect of this somewhat utopian view was that collective ownership of the economy was also something to strive for. It was a perspective that did not argue for a mere extension of membership of the existing class system, which is the more common meaning behind the term 'transformation' in use in South Africa today and behind the idea of Black Economic Empowerment which argues that more blacks (including women) ought to become owners of capital and share in the financial benefits of the existing economic system.