South African Women On The Move

This exquisite book by award-winning photographer Karina Turok presents a series of portraits of inspirational and iconic South African women

This study examines womens experiences of cross-border migration and compares these experiences to those of men.

Although the international press closely chronicled the dismantling of South Africa's apartheid policies, it paid little attention to the unique role women from a variety of political parties played in establishing the new government. Utilizing interviews, participant observation, and archival research, Women in the South African Parliament tells an inspiring story of liberation, showing how these women achieved electoral success, learned to work with lifelong enemies, and began to transform Parliament by creating more space for women's voices during a critical time in the life of their democracy. Arguing from her detailed analysis of the strategies and political tactics used by these South African women, both individually and collectively, Hannah Britton contends that, contrary claims in earlier studies of the developing world, mobilization by women prior to a transition to democracy can lead to gains after the transition--including improvements in constitutional mandates, party politics, and representation. At the same time, Britton demonstrates that not even national leadership can ensure power for all women and that many who were elected to South Africa's first democratic parliament declined to run again, feeling they could have a greater impact working in their own communities.

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women’s education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students’ experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women’s social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education—introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

A memoir of loss and triumph by one of South Africa's most powerful women--now in paperback.

Among the questions it seeks to answer are: • Who migrates? • Why do women migrate to South Africa? • What are the spatial and temporal patterns of female compared to male migration? • Does the economic behaviour of female and male migrants dif- fer? • What are the social experiences of women migrants? • How do men and women perceive the impacts of male and female migration at the individual, hous. [...] Relations of power and access to resources determine who moves where, when, how and why.1 Men and women have differ- ent access to power and resources across a range of scales, from the local to the global, and thus face different opportunities and constraints in determining their patterns of mobility. [...] Yet the links between gender and international migration in the region remain poorly understood.2 In an attempt to redress the balance, this paper examines the con- temporary experiences of women in relation to such cross-border migra- tion and compares these experiences to those of men. [...] WHAT FACTORS ENCOURAGE OR DISCOURAGE WOMEN'S MIGRATION TO SOUTH AFRICA? A key element of the SAMP survey was the part that investigated the potential to migrate through a series of questions on "push" and "pull" factors in the respondents' home countries and in South Africa. [...] If the legal and social restrictions on women's mobility are relaxed, and women come to engage more directly and fully in cross-border migration, the "feminisation" of migration may well lead to changes in the social linkages between places of origin and destina- tion, although whether this is a weakening or a strengthening remains to be seen.

A timely interdisciplinary, comparative and historical perspective on African childhood migration that draws on the experience of children themselves to look at where, why and how they move - within and beyond the continent - andthe impact of African child migration globally.