FEMINISM AND WOMEN IN SOUTH AFRICA FEMINISM AND THE ’OTHER’ '[T]he task of feminism is to examine the particular ways in which power operates within and between the political, social and economic spheres of specific societies – in effect, it is a political project of transformation.' One example was the inability for all women to vote until 1983 and cultural sexism manifesting through severe violence against women. South Africa has high rates of rape and domestic violence which frequently go… At the same time, Africa is not a monolith and so some have critiqued any idea of "African feminism." South African feminisms have been shaped as much by struggles for political and racial equality as by national and transnational struggles for gender equality. Woman in South Africa have historically faced a myriad of state-facilitated and socially-practiced discrimination including pay discrimination. As an interest group, African feminism set off in the early twentieth century with women like Adelaide Casely-Hayford, the Sierra Leonian women’s rights activist referred to as the “African Victorian Feminist” who contributed widely to both pan-African and feminist goals, Charlotte Maxeke who in 1918 founded the Bantu Women’s League in South Africa and Huda Sharaawi who in 1923 established the Egyptian Feminist Union. Previously the history of women's political organization, their struggle for freedom from oppression, for community rights and, importantly, for gender equality, was largely ignored in history texts. (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2007): 8-12.

While African women from, for example, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa and Senegal will have some commonalities, there will be … Feminism in South Africa has been shaped by struggles for political and racial equality, as well as by national and transnational struggles for gender equality. Women such as Sojourner Truth exemplify Black feminist activism in the nineteenth century.

This type of feminism is viewed from the lenses of radical African feminism (in Africa, this was marked as finding a voice), Afro-centric radical feminism ((theories like motherism emerge in this category), and grass-roots African feminism. Not only did most of these older books lean heavily towards white … Grass-roots and development focused postcolonial African feminism largely emerges in the 1980s and 1990s especially after the landmark UN decade for women … In 1892 another Black woman, Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice from the South, a book in which she described the importance of the voices of Black women for social change. ~ African feminism: the African woman’s struggle for identity ~ There exist differences regionally, ethnically, politically, and in religion, which all work to impact how women conceptualize what feminism and freedom looks like for them. Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, bawel’imilambo/they remove boulders and cross rivers, N. Gasa, ed. It is only over the last three or four decades that women's role in the history of South Africa has, belatedly, been given some recognition. (Hassim 2004:2) In her book 'The Second Sex'