Is there really a need for Women’s Day?

Cape Town writer Helen Moffett has published two measured books on water conservation and waste recycling, but her 2012 column, published in the Sunday Times’ BooksLIVE and called “Take your Women’s Day and shove it” is full of expletives and capital letters.

It pops up on Facebook every year about this time: “Dear Government (big, small, national and local), Here’s an idea. Take your pathetic, meaningless, mind-blowingly expensive and stomach-churningly patronising Women’s Day and cancel it. Cancel the entire idea of ‘women’s month’. Tell me, what is the fucking point?”

Moffett says after all, it’s “open season for violence against South African women 24/7”, and makes a plea for the government to rather use the money to fund the struggling Rape Crisis helpline and the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, “which is literally having bake sales to keep running”.

The meaning of Women’s Day is lost among the junketing, she says. “Cancel the froth and bubbles. What you have reduced the 1956 Women’s March to is a travesty. That was an occasion of extraordinary dignity and power ... Lilian Ngoyi and Albertina Sisulu and the thousands of brave women who took part that day are squirming in their graves at your appalling, ongoing, almost casual abandonment of this country’s women, especially the poorest ones. The public spectacle of hypocrisy that is Women’s Day is just rubbing salt into their wounds.”

In 2020, Moffett reprised her column with one called “How to make Women’s Day even worse: just add pandemic plus lockdown”. Despairing over the way the virus targets the most vulnerable, and suggesting violent men “put down their fists” for Women’s Day, she concludes that “as a nation, we’re in an abusive relationship with our government”.

Cancel the froth and bubbles. What you have reduced the 1956 Women’s March to is a travesty.

—  Helen Moffett

Moffett said she made the 2012 post in a rage, but was “still angry”. And who wouldn’t be? The Women’s Day fanfare and speeches trotted out stand in stark contrast to the reality of most women’s lives in SA. Year after year, SA ranks high on most dangerous places to live in the world, especially for women, and is a no-go area for solo female travellers.

Still, many women vote to keep the annual day and month dedicated to remembering the 1956 march — when 20,000 women of all races protested against the apartheid government’s Urban Areas Act by demonstrating at the Union Buildings — as well as those who have come after them.

“I’d venture to say hardly anyone, especially our youth, would recall the significance of this day, which was a pivotal moment in our history,” says Joanne Joseph, journalist and author of Children of Sugarcane.

“But if we don’t remember the significance of this day, then its power is lost in demonstrating to us the role of women in struggle in this country. This public holiday commemorates one day in our history when women demanded to be heard, but it links backward and forward into history, to all the instances when women vociferously took to the streets to protest against unjust laws and demand their rights either individually or en masse and endured the brutality of authorities as a result.

“Importantly, there needs to be more will on the part of our government, not just to pay lip service to the rights of women but to display a real commitment to that by overhauling the policing and justice systems and prioritising the conversation about women’s equality, dignity and the right to safety in our country. The media has a particularly important role to play in acting as a forum for education and debate on these issues.”

Asked if we should retain the public holiday, Nikki Bush, a speaker on women’s empowerment and the author of Future-Proof Yourself, said: “Yes, because we need to wake society up about the systemic biases against women.”

These include the median gender pay gap (23% to 35%) and the much lower representation of women in senior positions. But she says it is also a time for women to reflect on how they may have internalised a biased mindset, and could take a leaf from men’s book and negotiate a better package or working conditions.

The government’s messaging around Women’s Day and month should be more proactive, says Bush, emphasising empowerment rather than “the stories that hold us captive”. We should be hearing more stories from women themselves, “their whispers of wisdom that are undocumented, to help others”. And rather than blaming the past for our problems, we should change the present and future.

Zandile Mkwanazi, who founded GirlCode in 2014 to address the tech gender gap, agrees: “As much as it is important to continuously look back and acknowledge that day, we also need to look forward and celebrate the achievements of women in society today. For many companies it might be seen as a marketing opportunity, but I believe that the many conferences, webinars, etc, happening during the month are creating the much-needed spotlight on women who are breaking glass ceilings in their respective industries. Women’s Day has opened up many opportunities for me and my business.”

But, she says, “the public and private sector have the power to put policies in place that ensure equality. Rather than just having events, they must put women-owned businesses onto their supplier chain”.

Busisiwe Mavuso, CEO of Business Leadership SA, believes Women’s Day is fulfilling its function of drawing attention to the gender agenda, but “the problems extend beyond one day or one month”.

Whereas corporates are trying to be representative in terms of equal opportunity, they are not removing barriers to the glass ceiling. The system, designed for men, needs to change to be more accommodating to women otherwise they will just become lost in it and drop out, she says.

“More diverse teams deliver better results, so we are not being done a favour by being included as women. The command and control style of leadership is dead as we’re in the age of co-operation, inclusion, finding common ground and collaboration, which comes more naturally for women.”

We can scrap Women’s Day the day we have scrapped patriarchy.

—  Melanie Judge

“We can scrap Women’s Day the day we have scrapped patriarchy,” says Melanie Judge, an LGBTI activist and adjunct associate professor in public law at the University of Cape Town.

“We have a powerful legal framework on women’s rights,” she says. “The problem is less about law, and more about making real on the implementation of the law, and about holding those who are tasked to do so to account. The focus should not only be on the empowerment of women, but on how men wield power in ways that thwart women’s empowerment. There is a need to challenge masculinities that are predicated on ideas of women as having less value, less say, less autonomy, as that’s the oil that greases the wheels of gender inequality.”

Moffett points out in her blog that part of the victimisation of women in SA is the abuse meted out to women who are seen to be homosexual. Says Judge: “Women are diverse, as are their identities and experiences, and there should be space for the expression of that diversity. As a social and political group, women continue to experience oppression and exclusion, and the rights we have gained increasingly face a local and global backlash.”

Josephs says that to accelerate gender equality, we cannot ignore the hardships of the LGBTQI+ community, which continues to face discrimination. “Discrimination is often intersectional, which connects the struggles of women with all disadvantaged groups, and hopefully helps us build empathy with everyone who experiences gender-based discrimination or becomes the target of hate.

“For too long, we have been dictated to as to what narrowly defines womanhood. This is not the time to perpetuate the destructive thinking around ‘them and us’. It ought rather to be a moment of acceptance so we can work towards one day celebrating the freedom of living in a country committed to the lived practice of human rights for all.”

All public holidays are in danger of being seen as simply a day off work, another “Braai Day”. How do we prevent this?

“We need to become a far more socially conscious society that is committed to eradicating inequality and discrimination no matter one’s gender, race or economic class,” says Joseph. “The school curriculum needs to foreground issues of intersectional discrimination against women. We have failed to teach our children about some of the most important history that shapes their present-day lives, and so long as they are unable to have critical conversations about these dynamics, it is unlikely change will occur.”

Mkwanazi says: “It is up to us as women to make it what we need it to be, it shouldn’t be just about celebrating — it should be part of a deliberate strategy for women to be recognised as equal citizens.”

But braais are OK on Women’s Day, says Judge: “Women’s immense contribution to building democracy and human rights in South Africa can also be celebrated around the braai. Indeed, what happens around the braai matters in terms of gender power relations.”