International Women's Day

August is Women's Month in South Africa. Women's Day is commemorated annually on August 9 in memory of the march held by women in 1956 to protest against apartheid pass laws, and a decision to apply them to women too.

 

Women rallied worldwide on Sunday to demand equal rights and protest against domestic violence and growing poverty in the global economic crisis.

Women’s status raised since 1994:Zuma South Africa has made notable progress in its efforts to elevate the status of women since 1994, President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday. Addressing the national annual women’s day celebrations in Pretoria, Zuma said he was pleased with the progress made in the past 18 years, although the government still had a lot to do. “While we still have a lot of work to do, we are satisfied with the progress made thus far in improving the status and quality of life of women, in only 18 years of freedom. Times Alive [http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2012/08/09/womens-status-raised-since-1994-zuma]

 Women's rights: Will the real ANC please stand up? The ANC's leaders risk erasing the long and painful history of women's struggle for equality. They could learn a thing or two from the youth league. In its rush to condemn the Constitution as a compromise imposed on the majority of South Africans, the ANC's current leadership is in danger of erasing the long and painful history of women's struggle for equal rights and full citizenship.

As it lurches dangerously into the arms of the social conservatives, it is reconstructing its history in ways that may pit feminists against the very party that was once their strongest ally. In the past four years, the "women question" has been more discussed in relationship to which faction of the leadership battle the ANC Women's League will support rather than how to strengthen women's rights. Mail & Guardian [http://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-07-deep-read-will-the-real-anc-please-stand-up]

Women's Day: The rock has been struck. Now what? Unless National Women's Day is to offer more than a rhetorical gesture towards the magnificence of South African women at large, should we even bother to do more than take the opportunity to do the work we do when we are not "at work"?

The weariness is not personal. The reality is that although the child support grant has kept millions of women on the survival side of near-destitution and South African legal frameworks take gender equality seriously at many levels, 2012 presents us with shocking statistical profiles.

Released late last year, the health department's figures for maternal mortality show us that more women are dying in childbirth now than were in 1994. Most black women remain dependent on domestic service (often casual), agricultural labour and informal trading for paid labour. Education systems, already challenged as they are, have become spaces in which girls' safety is the focus of international Human Rights Watch reports. Women and girls who are lesbian face public assault and often Women and girls who are lesbian face public assault and often worse, as do any women, especially young ones, who openly defy what is expected of them "as women". Mail & Guardian [http://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-03-00-womens-day-the-rock-has-been-struck-now-what]

Beauty, the beast and the othering of women

I have been pondering a mass revolt against the beauty industry. This mostly male-owned industry, along with the mainstream media, is premised on beautyism, a very effective tool for "othering" women who do not fit into the idealised picture of what is pleasing to the male gaze.  Beautyism bestows all sorts of virtues and privileges on a woman simply because she is beautiful. And the beauty industry preys on this false belief.

Many modern women fail to recognise the beauty industry as a form of oppression because their mothers and fathers initiate them into beautyism from a very young age. They grow up within easy reach of a propaganda campaign waged by the media and the beauty industry.

Many women fail to make a conscious connection between their consistent feelings of failure and the amount of money they are prepared to spend to numb that pain by conforming to society's standards of beauty.

Times Alive [http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2012/08/08/the-big-read-beauty-the-beast-and-the-othering-of-women]