Emily Bridger's Young Women Against Apartheid is a groundbreaking book, exploring the experiences of women who as girls and young women took part in confrontational student protests during South Africa's 1980s. The book is based on a remarkable series of interviews that the author conducted with 49 former youth activists (mainly women), allowing rich insights into everyday life within these movements. As such, it differs in approach from existing studies of the decade, which have frequently concentrated on official organizational politics. While all Bridger's interviewees were part of COSAS (the Congress of South African Students), an African National Congress-affiliated student organization, the main focus of the book is not COSAS as such, but women's accounts of their experiences.

Partly due to the explicit gender-neutrality of these student movements, which branded all activists as ‘comrades’ and elided gender difference (in pursuit of equality), and partly because there were indeed more men than women active in the street politics of the decade, there has been very little academic work on women in protest politics in the 1980s. Bridger's work offers an important corrective, demonstrating both that women actively participated in politics, and that such experiences had a lasting impact on women participants’ lives.

The book is organized in a unique way — rather than chronologically, the chapters are divided spatially, including ‘the School’, ‘the Home’, ‘the Meeting’, ‘the Street’, ‘the Prison Cell’, and ‘the Interview’. This approach probably emerged in part from a methodological challenge of oral history — one has the sense that Bridger's interviewees narrated a timeless span of protest, rather than giving an events-based account, making chronology challenging. In organizing the chapters in this way, Bridger lets her interviewees shape her analysis, rather than forcing their stories into a narrative arc. Indeed, a strength of this book is its reflection on methodology, and its feminist-informed respect for the reach and limits of testimony. But the spatial organization offers the additional benefit of exploring the overlapping spaces activists inhabited — it tries to fit their whole lives into the frame of the book, not just the time they spent in official spaces. The result is powerful insight into the feeling of activist life. Stand-out details, like the fact that comrades were ridiculed by classmates for being ‘dirty’ (they slept away from home to avoid police and couldn't wash), bring a richness that organizational histories cannot (76). Although Bridger doesn't explicitly reference him, the book responds to Ciraj Rassool's critique of South African historiography's focus on the ‘documentary tradition’, and the resultant narrowing of political histories to formal organizations.Footnote ¹ In drawing attention to how women lived as activists across the disparate spaces of the home, the street, schools, and meeting rooms, Bridger expands the scope of what counts in political history, and of who counts.

The inclusion of a chapter on ‘the Prison Cell’ is notable. As Bridger discusses, many people have written prison memoirs — but very few political histories say much about prison time, meaning imprisonment is often relegated to the personal realm, outside of the space of politics. Bridger's approach, which throughout the book breaks down ‘the false divides between public and private sphere’ (221), challenges this exclusion and insists that time in jail was as much a part of the experience of political activism as attending meetings. This chapter also contains the most direct quotes from her interviews, making this reader hungry for more — it could have been effective to see more such excerpts.

In her chapter ‘The Streets’, Bridger explores the troubling fact that her interviewees were willing to speak openly and even with excitement about acts of violence, including necklacing — something male comrades were more likely to avoid mentioning. Bridger suggests that precisely because women were more marginalized and seen as more excluded from the domain of confrontational politics, they had more reason to emphasize rather than downplay their involvement in such events. A key debate has been over whether women participated in more confrontational politics merely as ‘honorary [or surrogate] men’, as scholars like Daniel Magaziner and Mamphela Ramphele have argued.Footnote ² Bridger's analysis offers new insights here: examining both what her interviewees did in the past and how they remember and recount the events today, she suggests that women's violence must be understood as gendered, motivated not only by adherence to organizational politics (the demands of COSAS), but also by the desire to confront restrictive gender norms, and to become part of and defend a particular community. With sensitivity, Bridger points out that these factors continue to shape women's capacity to narrate their experiences, including perhaps silencing feelings of guilt or grief at the expense of more celebratory accounts. This work strongly suggests the need for future research into women's participation in violent acts in other contexts and periods.

It would also be interesting to hear more about the question of politics in general as understood by these comrades. Bridger reveals that women comrades, in addition to participating in well-known types of street politics of the decade, like enforcing boycotts, also took lesser-known actions, such as sanctioning rapists and disciplining truant girls. With such examples, Bridger convincingly demonstrates that these women came to politics for a variety of reasons — it would be interesting to draw out the theoretical implications of this analysis further. Equally, it's only in the final chapter that Bridger discusses the enmity that existed between the ANC-affiliated COSAS and alternative political tendencies. It could be interesting to hear more about how these tensions played out in the 1980s.

Overall, this book is an impressive contribution to historical work on South Africa's 1980s, and to histories of women and girls in politics. Via innovative oral historical work, this book challenges accounts that have relegated women and girls or suggested they could only participate in activism as mother figures. And in drawing attention to women's ongoing activism, Bridger enables new periodizations of anti-apartheid resistance and wider theorization of just what it meant to be anti-apartheid. It will be of interest to historians of South Africa, specialists in gender studies and girlhood studies, oral historians, and scholars of protest more widely.