The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women: A History of Public Motherhood in Women’s Antiracist Activism: Winner of the 2017 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

Abstract

AbstractThis article reexamines the roots of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), the first national organization of women from all state-defined racial groups united against apartheid, founded in 1954. It argues that the deep history of public motherhood in southern Africa was what made FEDSAW possible: biological and symbolic motherhood had long been associated with responsibility for public social life in the region. Moreover, the article demonstrates that the first half of the twentieth century represented a time of profound transformation in the ways that women in southern Africa talked about and experienced motherhood. The influences of both missionary Christianity and international socialism encouraged women to claim that long-standing regional cultural forms of public engagements were an extension of private maternal responsibilities. African women talked about their public activism as emanating from an idealized private sphere to make themselves legible as social actors, both to agents...