Womens+emancipation+the+goal,+T.+Mbeki,+ANC+Today


 * ANC Today, Volume 5, No. 49 • 9—15 December 2005**

= **Women's emancipation is the goal!** =

The important international campaign - 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women and Children - will conclude on 10 December, International Human Rights Day, the day after the publication of this edition of ANC TODAY. The choice of 10 December helps correctly to emphasise the fundamental proposition that women's rights are human rights!

We take this opportunity to salute all our compatriots who participated in this campaign. All of us need to acknowledge the fact that like elsewhere in the world, many women and children in our country continue to fall victim to various kinds of criminal violence. This underlines the fact that we still have a long way to go before we can say that we have achieved the goal of the genuine emancipation of women.

When we spoke in Port Elizabeth last year at the beginning of the 16 Days of Activism, we said that the struggle to end violence against women and children should engage us for the 365 days of every year, and not just the 16 days set aside to focus on this important challenge.

In other words, this activism should be integrated in all our daily struggles as part of our effort to build a people-centred society, which respects and upholds the vision spelt out in our Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Our movement correctly prides itself and strives constantly to discharge its responsibility as the leading political force in our country dedicated to the genuine and all-round emancipation of all our people, regardless of race, colour, gender and age.

It must therefore also take the lead in the struggle for the emancipation of women, which includes the eradication of gender violence. It must remain loyal to the strategic vision it has absorbed for many decades, which defines the emancipation of women as an integral part of the struggle for national liberation and the national democratic revolution.

When he proclaimed 1984 the Year of the Women in the January 8th Statement of that year, the late Oliver Tambo said:

"It will be our special task this year to organise and mobilise our womenfolk into a powerful, united and active force for revolutionary change. This task falls on men and women alike - all of us together as comrades in the struggle. We wish to stress the need, at the present hour, for the emergence on the political scene of a women's movement that is politically and organisationally united. Our struggle needs and demands this potentially mighty force.

"Our struggle will be less than powerful and our national and social emancipation can never be complete if we continue to treat the women of our country as dependent minors and objects of one form of exploitation or another. Certainly no longer should it be that a woman's place is in the kitchen. In our beleaguered country, the woman's place is in the battlefront of struggle...

"I declare 1984 'The Year of the Women', and charge the entire democratic and patriotic forces of our country with the task of joining in the effort to mobilise our women to unite in struggle for people's power!"

The central point made in this message was that "our national and social emancipation can never be complete if we continue to treat the women of our country as dependent minors and objects of one form of exploitation or another". Neither can our national and social emancipation be complete if we do not succeed to free our society of the scourge of violence against women and children.

For well over a century, the international progressive movement has recognised the fact emphasised by Oliver Tambo, that national and social emancipation must of necessity entail the liberation of women. Our movement therefore has an obligation to ensure that its programmes of action demonstrate in practice that we understand and respect this fundamental proposition, including the imperative to fight against violence against women and children.

Earlier this year, as we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, we paid tribute to an outstanding South African woman, Olive Schreiner, who was born 150 years ago, and called on our nation to honour her in a fitting manner. In this context, we must also mention another eminent South African woman, Charlotte Maxeke, who passed away 66 years ago, in 1939.

I mention these two historic figures in the struggle for our national and social emancipation because their activities and their views must continue to educate and inspire us properly to understand the place of the challenge of the liberation of women in everything we do as we strive to advance the goal of social transformation, the defining feature of the current phase of the national democratic revolution.

We have referred to the historical position of the international progressive movement with regard to the challenge of women's liberation. In this context, we would like to cite comments made by a leading woman member of the progressive European working class movement, Rosa Luxemburg, who was active during the latter part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries. Speaking at the 12 May 1912 Second Social Democratic Women's Rally, in Stuttgart, Germany, on Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle, she said:

"Women's suffrage is the goal. But the mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women alone, but is a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat. Germany's present lack of rights for women is only one link in the chain of the reaction that shackles the people's lives. And it is closely connected with the other pillar of the reaction: the monarchy.

"In advanced capitalist, highly industrialised, twentieth-century Germany, in the age of electricity and airplanes, the absence of women's political rights is as much a reactionary remnant of the dead past as the reign by Divine Right on the throne. Both phenomena - the instrument of heaven as the leading political power, and woman, demure by the fireside, unconcerned with the storms of public life, with politics and class struggle - both phenomena have their roots in the rotten circumstances of the past, in the times of serfdom in the country and guilds in the towns...

"A hundred years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words: In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true for our present society. The current mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat's general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future. Because of the female proletariat, general, equal, direct suffrage for women would immensely advance and intensify the proletarian class struggle."

Echoing these sentiments during the period she lived in Great Britain, and after the struggle for women's suffrage had largely emerged victorious, in a July 1918 speech in honour of John Stuart Mill, Olive Shreiner said:

"We are meeting today to commemorate a man whom I believe to be the noblest of those whom the English-speaking race has produced in the last hundred years. John Stuart Mill laboured for the freedom of women. But he did more. He laboured for human freedom. Women can best show their gratitude to him by studying his writings.

"Many women have now the vote, and are part of the governing power of their nation - all will have it soon. If we wish to use our power to its noblest end, we shall have to learn the lesson Mill taught - that the freedom of all human creatures are essential to the full development of human life on earth. We shall have to labour, not merely for a larger freedom for ourselves, but for every subject race and class, and for all suppressed individuals."

Understanding fully the central importance of the struggle for the emancipation of women, Olive Shreiner also published a treatise entitled "Woman and Labour". Paying tribute to women who had engaged in struggle for liberation, understanding that much still remained to be achieved, she wrote: "One word more I should like to add, as I may not again speak or write on this subject. I should like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us - 'You will look back at us with astonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little; at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take; at the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive; at the great truths staring us in the face, which we failed to see; at the truths we grasped at, but could never quite get our fingers round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little - but, what you will never know is how it was thinking of you and for you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little which we have done; that it was in the thought of your larger realisation and fuller life, that we found consolation for the futilities of our own.' What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me."

Olive Schreiner spoke of women such as Charlotte Maxeke, one of the founders of the ANC Women's League, to whom many have paid all necessary tribute. Speaking at the 1901 Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in a statement pregnant with meaning, Charlotte Maxeke said, "I left (to study in the United States) a Basuto girl, and returned an African girl for the whole of Africa."

Of her, Professor DDT Jabavu said: "Throughout all her life she has been engaged in efforts of a patriotic character on behalf of the aboriginal races of Africa, these efforts entailing herculean tasks every time. Her social line has been the redemption of our womanhood as well as humanity in general. The League of Bantu Women which she was responsible for starting, was a wonderful movement that stirred the imagination of our people and unmistakably infused a widened public spirit among our women-folk throughout South Africa with results still traceable right to the present time."

Many years later, Professor ZK Matthews said: "She was an eloquent speaker and a fearless denouncer of the disabilities under which her people laboured. Soon she came to be recognised as an authority, especially in matters affecting women and juveniles...She was also active in the political organisations of the African people. She encouraged women to enter into the political arena and in the now outlawed ANC. She was one of those who advocated the establishment of the Women's Section of the ANC commonly known as the Women's League. For many years she was its President. Charlotte Maxeke was a stout lady with a striking face, with sharp penetrating eyes which could strike terror into those who crossed words with her and yet be gentle and kind to those who needed her sympathy."

The outstanding African American scholar and revolutionary, WEB du Bois said: "I have known Charlotte Manye Maxeke since 1894, when I went to Wilberforce University as a teacher. She was one of the three or four students from South Africa, and was the only woman. She was especially the friend of Nina Gomer, the student who afterwards became my wife...I regard Mrs Maxeke as a pioneer in one of the greatest of human causes, working in extraordinarily difficult circumstances to lead a people, in the face of prejudice, not only against her race but against her sex...I think that what Mrs Maxeke has accomplished should encourage all men, especially those of African descent."

Today, we can address a similar tribute to Rosa Parks, the humble working class African American woman who died earlier this year, having dared, 50 years ago in 1955, to launch what became a massive and historic defiance campaign and civil rights struggle against racism in the United States.

As we end this year's 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women and Children, we must recall the example set for all progressive forces and peoples by such outstanding women fighters for liberation as Rosa Luxemburg, Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Maxeke and Rosa Parks. We must remember Olive Sheriner's words when she said, addressing all future generations - "it was thinking of you and for you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little which we have done".

Surely, when Charlotte Maxeke said more than a century ago - "I left (to study in the United States) a Basuto girl, and returned an African girl for the whole of Africa" - she did not intend that this African girl for the whole of Africa should come back to a country and continent that continued to perpetrate violence against women and children!


 * Thabo Mbeki**

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