Essay On Women Liberation

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In this essay I will discuss how the glorification of women’s role in the liberation movements has silenced their real and lived experiences during the struggle. I will explore the gender hierarchy in the camps and I will also explain how the gender roles within the liberation movements in Southern Africa worked. Firstly I will discuss how the liberation movement viewed women; secondly I will explore the lived experiences of the women in the movements and their interactions with the men in the struggle. Lastly I will explore how and why the glorification of women’s role in the liberation movement occurred.
Gender is seen as a societal construction that refers to the characteristics that differentiate between a man and a woman; and gender roles refers to the social and behavioural expectations deemed ‘appropriate’ for a specific gender, male or female (Kessler,1990).
The gender hierarchy and gender roles within the liberation movements
During the Southern African liberation movement many women joined the struggle in the fight for independence against apartheid. The African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa was seen as the first liberation movement to excel at striving for gender equality in its political organisation. Even though it had applied its ‘equality’ clause the real live experiences of women in the struggle was vastly different to the ideal of equality (Hissam, 2004). The liberation camps were mainly male-dominated, and women were seen as second class citizens or second class members of the ANC; women’s participation in the liberation struggle was largely due to the set terms made by men.
Women were seen as a collective that was a supportive structure to the men in the camps, for men the ‘real work’ was seen as ...

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...minated by their resulting political positions in the democratic system in South Africa after the liberation movement. The glorification of women after the struggle is a way of silencing the women’s voices about their lived experiences in the liberation movement and a form of control. By creating a ‘symbolized’ figure of the ideal women during the struggle has a political purpose that benefits the men in a patriarchal society. Men in power intentionally promoted the glorification of women’s roles in the struggle in order to diminish the plight of women during the liberation movement. The glorification of women functioned as a way to create a definite role for women that is seen as being equal but in reality is socially, politically and economically subordinate to men; it is a men’s vanguard of giving women a conditional and restrictive purpose in defining society.

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