Gaye Davis
SOUTH Africa’s new status as not only a democracy, but one where women have significant representation, has not come about without cost. The influx of women into Parliament has drained the women’s movement of some of its dynamos.
Speaker Frene Ginwala identified the problem in her keynote address to a conference on Gender and the Constitution in Cape Town earlier this year, when she said: “We are in Parliament and we are ecstatic that we have women parliamentarians and cabinet ministers here.
“But we will remain just parliamentarians who are struggling to get women’s rights placed on the agenda unless we have the support and the backing of a strong South African women’s movement.”
But the strong women’s voices heard during the 1980s have gone, and the National Women’s Coalition, which brought diverse women’s groups together to push for women’s demands at multi-party talks, is only now slowly finding its feet again under new leadership.
Its mandate now is to implement the Women’s Charter for Effective Equality, launched last year, and the soil in which political, legal and legislative strategies for gender transformation can grow.
Brigitte Mabandla, Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture, Science and Technology, recognises the gap that has opened up between women inside Parliament and those outside.
‘Women in Parliament were dealing with the burdens of adjustment. The lack of input from women in civil society has to do with the burdens they carry on the ground: their imperatives are work and housekeeping and they lack resources. Parliament is now open, but you see very few women coming to make representations in portfolio
And part of the problem, she says, was the failure to work out any strategy to take the struggle beyond the initial goal of getting a quota system in place.
Says ANC MP Jenny Schreiner: “Part of our problem is we have failed to take gender into the mainstream of politics. (That voice) has been replaced by strong women’s lobbies and voices heard at the policy-making level, which means we’re empowering each other instead of women at the grassroots. It’s elitist.
“There’s a need for women to be at the forefront of the union movement and in grassroots and rural structures. We need to encourage women to organise on a mass basis, with the National Women’s Coalition or a similar body networking among them,” says Schreiner.
Says Mabandla: “It’s also imperative that the ANC Women’s League stands on its feet. It is home to many ordinary women, the poorest of the poor and the homeless.”
Without the backing of a strong women’s lobby in civil society, women walking the corridors of power will have a harder task.
It’s a time of unprecedented change — and unparalleled opportunity. Women in Parliament know this. But they’re also aware they can’t go it alone, without a significant partnership with women outside government — and that, until gender relations are transformed, women will continue to be disempowered and marginalised.