Women in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

'You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock'

On August 9, 1956, an estimated 20,000 women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the extension of pass laws to Black women. Led by Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, the march was one of the largest demonstrations in South African history to that point. The women stood in silence for 30 minutes, then burst into a freedom song that became an anthem: 'Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo' — 'You strike a woman, you strike a rock.'

August 9 is now celebrated as National Women's Day in South Africa. But the 1956 march was not an isolated moment — it was the culmination of years of organizing by the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), founded in 1954. FEDSAW brought together women from the ANC Women's League, the Congress of Democrats, the South African Indian Congress, and the Coloured People's Congress in a multiracial coalition that prefigured the Freedom Charter's inclusive vision.

Leaders in Their Own Right

The anti-apartheid movement produced remarkable women leaders who have too often been overshadowed in the retelling. Lilian Ngoyi was the first woman elected to the ANC's national executive committee and spent years under banning orders that confined her to her home in Orlando, Soweto. Albertina Sisulu, wife of Walter Sisulu and a formidable organizer in her own right, co-presided over the United Democratic Front in the 1980s while her husband was imprisoned on Robben Island.

Ruth First, a journalist and scholar, was assassinated by a letter bomb sent by South African agents to Mozambique in 1982. Winnie Mandela kept the ANC's cause alive during the long decades of her husband's imprisonment, becoming a powerful symbol of resistance — though her legacy was later complicated by serious allegations of violence and intimidation. Dorothy Nyembe served 15 years in prison for harboring MK guerrillas. These women were not supporting players — they were principals.

At the grassroots level, women often bore the heaviest burden of apartheid's daily indignities. They navigated the pass system, kept families together when men were imprisoned or worked in distant cities, organized community resistance, and sustained the social fabric of township life under conditions of extreme deprivation.

From Struggle to Constitution

Women's activism during the anti-apartheid era had a direct impact on the post-apartheid settlement. The Women's National Coalition, formed in 1992, organized across racial and political lines to ensure that the new constitution would include comprehensive gender equality protections. Their campaign was remarkably successful: South Africa's 1996 constitution is one of the most progressive in the world on gender rights, explicitly prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, sexual orientation, and marital status.

The lesson from women's role in the anti-apartheid struggle is both inspiring and cautionary. Women were essential to every phase of the movement — from organizing and mobilizing to armed resistance and negotiation. Yet they had to fight continuously for recognition within the very movement they helped build. The gains they achieved in the constitution were not gifts from grateful male leaders; they were won through the same determined organizing that had challenged apartheid itself.