The women's movement in America tried but failed to have this language added to the U.S. Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Here's what South Africans wrote into their 1994 constitution: The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.
In addition to crafting an extraordinarily progressive constitution, South Africans, particularly newly enfranchised women in Parliament, used the momentous occasion of apartheid's end to construct an elaborate array of state institutions charged with advancing and empowering women in the new South Africa. Known as the National Gender Machinery, these structures of state feminism represent an achievement of considerable significance.
By way of explanation for these achievements, Hannah Britton's new book offers a compelling account of the efforts of women in South Africa, particularly the first two generations of women in Parliament, to bridge their myriad modes of involvement in the liberation struggle with the continuing struggle to achieve gender equality in the postapartheid era.
Although this is clearly a case study, Britton makes good use of secondary material from a number of comparative cases. Of particular value are the references to the experiences of the women's movement in Uganda that run throughout the text. There are also less frequent but still illuminating references to cases in other parts of Africa (e.g., Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe), Latin America, Europe, and Australia. From the sort of attention to the details of institutional culture that characterize this book, we learn that women in the Parliament of the latter case found themselves, as did women in the South African assembly, literally “frozen out” of the institution. That is, in both cases, the formerly exclusive suit-wearing male institutions were kept at temperatures ill suited for work by women whose typical business attire is lighter weight. It is such attention to the subtle obstacles to women's full and equal participation that makes this a useful and often enjoyable read.
Britton is at her best her when she is engaged with the nexus of race, class, and gender. Chapter 4 does a superb job of teasing apart the ways in which these multiple identities relate to competing views among women about gender and to outcomes such as the high attrition rate of women members of Parliament. In this latter discussion, she also does a good job of reinforcing the importance of women's incumbency, and thus this business of attrition is significant. It is also the basis for her concluding assessment that the future of women is uncertain and that it will take decades to make good on the promise of the first generations of women in Parliament.
Lingering challenges notwithstanding, Britton makes clear that women in South Africa made real gains in the postliberation era and that this contrasts sharply with the experiences of women in most other postliberation contexts. The relationship between these outcomes and women's participation in the antiapartheid struggle remain somewhat unclear, however. There appear to be two related methodological questions inadequately resolved. The first is how to establish causal links between women's collective action and specific outcomes, such as the inclusion of gender in Chapter 2, Section 9, of the constitution. The second is how to account for alternative explanations for these outcomes, many of which her own work seems to suggest. For example, one intriguing alternative explanation for constitutional and institutional developments is the high level of international interaction that characterized the antiapartheid movement and the subsequent transition to democracy. These are all well documented in the transitions literature and may well account for at least some of what has transpired. The author offers no clear way of discounting such an explanation.
In support of her claim, Britton notes that each of the major parties had teams at the Negotiating Council of the Multiparty Negotiating Process and that women “forced the leadership to permit each party's negotiating team one additional member—provided she was a woman” (p. 40). This seems to point in the direction of the causal linkages she posits; in the end, however, a number of these sorts of claims—highly plausible though they may be—remain unproven. Britton herself demonstrates how insignificant the mere inclusion of women in an institution may be. Indeed, one of her strongest contributions is to the critical mass literature, which she assails for failing to appreciate that “even with a greater number of women, institutions deeply entrenched in a patriarchal culture are often highly resistant to change” (p. 82). Similarly, the central proposition that women's grassroots efforts are tied to specific legislative advances, such as the Maintenance Act (never explained), the Domestic Violence Act, and the Customary Marriages Act, lacks support. In fact, the grassroots claim is hard to substantiate given how well she makes the case that the 1994 and 1999 Parliaments continued to privilege elites and their policy priorities.
This methodological shortcoming has an important theoretical ramification. Given the documented achievements in the area of state feminism, as well as her convincing comparisons to less successful transitions elsewhere, one would have liked to see her offer an explanation for this South African exceptionalism. Again, her own work suggests where such a line of inquiry might go; she might profit, for example, from an engagement with the literature on transnational activism (Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998), or that on pacted transitions (Timothy D. Sisk, Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract, 1995).
These problems notwithstanding, Women in the South African Parliament certainly has its merits. Much is found in the rich contextual detail rendered through the voices of those normally left voiceless in mainstream democratic transitions literature. It is rewarding to hear South African women—those who fought and those who defended the apartheid state but who now cooperate in cross-party caucusing—recount their experiences of such a remarkable time. Consistent with the best of feminist scholarship, the author brings us into contact and solidarity with the concerns of actors too often neglected in our disciplines.
