In an era in which keyboard revolutionaries abound it is hard to imagine the courage required for the 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings on August 9 1956 to protest against the pass laws. In their petition, signed by 14,000 people, they demanded an end to the “dompas” and decried the indignities it would bring to black women and their families. Prime minister JG Strydom sent his secretary to receive the petitions, and the rest is sad and tortuous history.
As the 70th anniversary of the march appears on our near horizon, the lot of women and children in this country is a bitter pill to swallow.
While the protesters of 1956 would no doubt have welcomed the universal franchise achieved in 1994, the unrelenting war against women and children is simply not acceptable.
More than 10,000 rapes are reported in SA every quarter, on top of thousands of other sexual assaults. Conviction rates are hopeless, meaning such crime is almost risk-free.
As if that is not bad enough, women are radically underrepresented in boardrooms and in management, and consistently report lower salaries.
The reasons for the lot of women in this country are complex. They are historical, cultural and socioeconomic, they reflect our gruesome history, our inequality and our structural rigidity. But there is a common theme at the heart of them all — men.
It is men that are responsible for the weight of violence and sexual assault that women face in SA as much as it is men who control the political and corporate culture in which their female colleagues operate.
It is more and more expected of those running businesses to lead with an eye on social justice and progressive ends, and not merely for the benefit of staff, customers and shareholders. This is to be entered into judiciously, as the managers of Bud Light found recently when a controversial partnership with a transgender social media personality was met with a consumer boycott.
However, one would think that creating an inclusive society for more than half the population is hardly a controversial idea. But if we are to weigh the issue honestly, it is a goal that manages to evade all sectors of SA society, including supposedly enlightened corporate and political spaces.
Women’s month, and the “16 Days of Activism” later in the year, are opportunities for corporations and political organisations to speak out about women’s issues. In light of the expectations of a more activist generation of shareholders and customers, a slew of events appears on the calendar, and the public relations machines churn out the statements and the invitations.
However, given the entirely negligible effect of these talk shops, panels and pearl-clutching, hand-wringing festivals, in darker moments it sometimes feels that it might be best to just call the whole thing off.
But that would be too cynical. Instead of a warm, sanitised annual corporate and political performance of no real value to women, Women’s Day ought to be used to remind the men who run organisations to intervene every day, in every meeting, and at every point of decision and at every conference and in every call and at every moment in every bar, bus station and taxi rank to make sure that their male friends and colleagues do the right thing.
As things stand, it’s a disastrous state of affairs.
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