African National Congress Women's League

The African National Congress Women's League (ANCWL) traces it origins to women's resistance to pass laws in the Orange Free State in 1913. This resistance arose among black women who had catered at the formation of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912. Charlotte Maxeke (1874–1939) founded the Bantu Women's League in 1918 because women were not allowed formal membership in the ANC. Maxeke wanted to overcome the belief that women belonged on the periphery of political activity as helpers. In the early 1920s the Bantu Women's League consisted of only a few branches. The branch in Maxeke's Zoutpansburg district defended the rights of pregnant women farmworkers against excessive hard labor and torture.

In 1943 the ANC revived the Women's League and appointed Madie Hall Xuma (1894–1982) as its first president. She was the black United States–born wife of the ANC president, Alfred Xuma . Ida Mtwana (1903–1960) became the next president, in 1948, representing a surge of youthful participation in politics. The ANCWL built strong branch and provincial structures, mostly in working-class urban townships throughout the country.

During the 1950s the ANCWL primarily fought the introduction of pass laws to African women. They saw passes as a tool to prevent women from seeking desperately needed employment in towns and as something that exposed women to sexual harassment from the police. Many women first participated in political action during the ANC's Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in 1952. This gave them experience and confidence to build the ANCWL, which became the largest partner in a nonracial umbrella organization formed in 1954, the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). In 1955, FEDSAW canvassed women's opinion to produce a Women's Charter for the Congress of the People in Kliptown. Thereafter the ANCWL organized protest marches, petitions, and demonstrations against the new pass laws, from 1956to1959, in both urban and rural areas.

The largest marches were to the government in Pretoria in 1955, involving two thousand women, and again in 1956, involving twenty thousand women from all over the country. Led by Lilian Ngoyi , Helen Joseph , Rahima Moosa , and Sophie De Bruyn , the women delivered thousands of petitions, then stood silently for half an hour before dispersing. They composed a song that day addressed to the South African prime minister Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom (1954–1958): “When you touch a woman, you have touched a rock, / you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” The march's anniversary, 9August, is now the National Women's Day public holiday in South Africa.

The government outlawed the ANCWL in a clampdown on political resistance following massacres of protesters at Sharpeville in 1960. Women activists then organized clubs under the banner of FEDSAW, but these could not be sustained in the face of the severe restrictions on women leaders. When many activists went into exile, the ANC formed a women's section under Gertrude Shope, a former teacher living in exile in Lusaka, Zambia. The women's section formed alliances with international women's organizations and kept women's issues alive in ANC publications.

During the 1980s a new round of women's organizations emerged inside South Africa as resistance to apartheid escalated. These included the Federation of Transvaal Women, the Port Elizabeth Women's Organisation, the Natal Organisation of Women, the United Women's Congress (Western Cape), the Congress of Border Women (Eastern Cape), and the Eastern Transvaal Women's Union. When the ban against it was lifted by the government, the ANCWL formally relaunched itself in 1991, incorporating internal and external women's organizations. It successfully demanded that all political parties participating in peace negotiations to end apartheid include women in their delegations.

Starting in 1991 the ANCWL led the National Women's Coalition, which embraced women from all political and racial groupings. The coalition canvassed women's opinions from throughout the country to formulate a Women's Charter. Presented to the newly installed South African president Nelson Mandela in 1994, this document formed the basis of full gender equality in the South African constitution adopted in 1996.

In the early 1990s the ANCWL demanded that a third of all officeholders within the ANC be women, but the idea met with strong resistance. Over time, however, the concept of gender quotas prevailed. In the 2006 local government elections the ANC enforced a 50 percent quota of women as municipal councillors. In its 2003 constitution the ANCWL dedicated itself to promoting the implementation of full equality of women in all spheres of life, to lobbying for affirmative action programs, to rooting out patriarchy, and to working toward ending violence against women and children. Leadership in the ANCWL has often served as a stepping-stone for women into senior political offices as ministers, premiers of provinces, and provincial members of executive committees.