Why women rebel: a comparative study of South African women's resistance in Bloemfontein (1913) and Johannesburg (1958)

Abstract

When the South African government began issuing passes to African women in 1956, the ensuing resistance campaign focused on the theme of insult to female dignity and motherhood. The women's fear of arbitrary arrest by physically abusive policemen in search of the new identity documents fuelled an unprecedented surge of popular protests and demonstrations. The impressive nature of this struggle has invited sweeping judgements on the amazing ability of women to protest, with the attendant tendency to oversimplify their motives.1 A closer look at these events raises some important questions. Although quite widespread, the resistance of the fifties was not uniform. Its intensity varied considerably from place to place and time to time. Certain types of women were more active than others and some did not take part at all. Why? Clearly certain women felt there was much more at stake than simply the dignity of womanhood. Further, if passes alone did not consistently provoke resistance, then what made the women's response so much more militant than men's? To answer these questions, I have chosen to focus on two particular case studies of women's anti-pass resistance. A useful historical precedent to the 1950s' style of rebellion occurred in the Orange Free State in 1913. Both the Bloemfontein 1913 campaign and the Johannesburg women's passive resistance of October 1958 stand out as incidents in which the women's determination was carried to a startling extreme: eager and voluntary imprisonment. What generated this kind of commitment? Why did it happen in these particular places and not in others? Since the details of these two episodes of resistance are not generally known, a brief summary of the events and their political background is in order.2