No Woman, No Revolution, Part 6
Organised
as Working Women
We have seen, by working
through the readings of Zetkin, Kollontai, Luxemburg, Lenin, the Comintern and
the Women’s Charter of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW; otherwise
called FSAW), that the class context, and also the South African
liberation-movement context, makes the clear understanding of women’s mass
organisation very critical. Women’s mass organisation is necessary, but it is
not easy. The difficulties come mainly from within the movement.
To sum up: Women are not a
separate class, which can be organised against men. Women are not exempt from
class struggle, but are as divided by class as men are, and divided into the
same classes as men are. Yet women, and working women in particular, do have a
common basis for organisation as a distinct and self-conscious mass.
Today’s text (see attached
and the link below) is an excerpt from Cheryl Walker’s 1982 book “Women and
Resistance in South Africa”. It concerns the position of FEDSAW in relation
to the apartheid regime, and also in relation to the African National Congress
Women’s League (ANCWL), in the period following FEDSAW’s founding in 1954.
The ANCWL had been founded in
1948; and the ANC was an Africans-only organisation until the 1969 National
Conference of the ANC in Morogoro, Tanzania. There was therefore an
objective need to organise women on a wider basis than that of the ANCWL. They
could have been organised separately, on racial lines, but in fact they chose
to organise on non-racial lines.
Among the leaders were Ray
Alexander, Dora Tamana, Josie Mphama, and Florence Matomela, who was awarded
the Order of Luthuli in Gold in the 2014 Freedom Day honours list.
As we noted, the 1954
formation of FEDSAW, intended as a non-racial women’s movement in South
Africa, and the simultaneous adoption of the Women’s Charter, prefigured the
Congress of the People and the adoption of the Freedom Charter which happened
in the following year, 1955.
All of that was to the good,
but it is also clear from Walker’s account that the relationship between FEDSAW
and the ANCWL was problematic in the 1950s. It is equally clear that very
similar problems continue, more than half a century later, to arise between,
for example, the ANCWL and the Progressive Women’s Movement (PWM) that was
launched in August 2006. In the 1950s, and again in the 2000s, the question of
whether to have individual membership, or not, was at issue. Here is some of
what Walker has to say about this:
“There were two
alternatives. Either the FSAW could seek its own mass membership or it could
base itself on a federal form, acquiring its members indirectly through each of
its affiliated member organisations. The matter was not settled at the
inaugural conference. A draft constitution proposing the first alternative – a
mass, individual membership – was circulated but failed to win overall
approval. Ray Alexander, and later the NEC based in Cape Town, supported this
constitution, but Ida Mtwana and, it would seem, the ANCWL in the Transvaal,
wanted a federal structure.
“In opposing
Alexander, Mtwana spoke on behalf of the Transvaal ANCWL, acting,
apparently, on the instructions of the provincial ANC. Their main fear was
that, if the FSAW were constituted on the basis of an individual membership, it
would compete against the ANCWL to the detriment of the latter. In taking this
position, the ANC revealed a degree of ambivalence towards the FSAW that it
would never entirely overcome. While supporting and welcoming the entry of
women into the national liberation movement, it was anxious to retain control
over their activities – a control it could exercise effectively over the
Women’s League but not so successfully over an independent FSAW.
“At the heart of
the debate between these two alternatives there thus lay a matter of central
importance – the relationship between the FSAW and ANC; the relationship
between the women’s movement and the senior partner in the national liberation
movement. The ANC was adamant on the issue and finally, reluctantly, the
individual membership group yielded towards the end of 1954. They conceded not
because they had been convinced by the other group’s arguments but because they
realised that without the support of the ANC, the women’s movement would be
isolated from the Congress Alliance.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: FedSAW, NEC and
Membership in 1955, Cheryl Walker, 1982.
