Women in the Background against Apartheid: Female Anti-Apartheid Activists in South Africa, 1950s–60s

My research explores the understudied activism of women in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement during the 1950s and 1960s. I investigate their motivations for joining the movement and the various crucial roles they played. I argue that female anti-apartheid activists were interconnected through age, gender, religion, location, and the effect of their activism on the movement. Women in South Africa were less restricted by the apartheid government. Although female anti-apartheid activists have received much less scholarly and public attention than their male counterparts, they played key roles by spreading messages, protesting, and providing aid to people in prison.

Exploring the role of female anti-apartheid activists is significant because of the fact that apartheid itself operated along gendered lines. At the beginning of apartheid, which began in 1948, restrictions were first placed on black men. To control and suppress the black majority, the South African government policed Black men and prevented them from having jobs, meeting with one another, and moving in and out of cities. Women, on the other hand, initially faced fewer restrictions, and they were able to move into urban communities to get jobs. By the mid-1950s, however, laws increasingly targeted women, including the Natives Act of 1952 that forced women to carry passes.

The anti-pass boycott march of the 1950s serves as the anchor for my larger investigation. I show that women involved in the movement came from different organizations such as the African National Congress, African Food and Canning Workers’ Union, South African Student Organization, and United Democratic Front. United by a fight against injustice, these women came from varying socioeconomic backgrounds: they were mothers, students, union workers, writers, and activists.

As primary sources, I analyze memoirs, newspapers, and pamphlets representing the voices of these women, which I found in the Senate House Library Archive in London. However, I also interrogate the ways in which these memoirs are skewed because they were mostly written while apartheid was still in effect and they served as propaganda for a foreign audience in support of the anti-apartheid movement.

My poster will contain information about the women and organizations included in my research. It will also include my research questions and a section showing how this research and these women fit into the broader context of the anti-apartheid movement. The text will be situated around photographs of the women along with scans from the memoirs, newspapers, and pamphlets that highlight their voices. It will be divided into three sections with the photographs, documents, and organizations as the main topics.