Seventy years after South Africa’s women’s march, the struggle is not over | Women’s Rights

Johannesburg, South Africa – Seventy years in the past, Sophie Williams-de Bruyn was 18 when she joined about 20,000 ladies marching to the Union Buildings, the seat of South Africa’s apartheid authorities, to protest in opposition to the extension of the go legal guidelines to Black ladies.

On August 9, 1956, the ladies gathered in Pretoria carrying a petition in opposition to legal guidelines that restricted the motion of Black South Africans. Williams-de Bruyn was among the many leaders of the march, which grew to become one of many defining moments of the nation’s liberation battle.

On Sunday, at 88, she returned to the identical grounds.

The nation round her had modified. Apartheid had ended, South Africa had turn out to be a democracy and girls had moved into among the nation’s highest workplaces. Its structure ensures equality and safety from discrimination.

However for a lot of ladies, the freedoms received via that political transformation haven’t translated into safety, financial alternative or dependable public providers.

“How can we absolutely rejoice our previous victories when our current actuality is so deeply disappointing and distressful?” Williams-de Bruyn requested.

Her query set a sombre tone for this yr’s Nationwide Ladies’s Day commemorations, which marked 70 years for the reason that historic march.

What the ladies of 1956 received

The ladies who marched in 1956 have been difficult one among apartheid’s most seen devices of racial management. The go legal guidelines regulated the place Black South Africans might stay and work, and the federal government deliberate to increase these restrictions to Black ladies.

The ladies delivered their petitions on the Union Buildings and stood in silence for half-hour earlier than leaving. The protest grew to become an emblem of ladies’s resistance and is now commemorated annually as Nationwide Ladies’s Day.

Practically 4 a long time later, apartheid was dismantled.

South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 introduced a brand new political order, adopted by a structure that positioned equality and human dignity at its centre. Ladies entered Parliament in important numbers and moved into senior positions throughout authorities, the judiciary and different establishments.

President Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to these good points throughout Sunday’s commemoration, highlighting South Africa’s progress in ladies’s political illustration, training, monetary inclusion and participation in decision-making.

Ladies now maintain among the nation’s highest positions, together with chief justice, parliament speaker and public protector.

However political illustration has not introduced equal financial safety.

“Ladies are greater than half of our inhabitants, however they don’t but maintain an equal share of our nation’s wealth, its land or its enterprises,” Ramaphosa stated.

Cassandra Dorasamy, a campaigner at Amnesty Worldwide South Africa, informed Al Jazeera that whereas the nation had made progress in ladies’s illustration, it had not seen the identical enchancment within the lives of nearly all of ladies.

“We’ve seen progress by way of ladies’s illustration in Parliament, firms and native authorities buildings, however we have now not seen the identical significant progress within the realities of nearly all of ladies within the nation,” she stated.

Violence and worry

Nowhere is that stress extra seen than in South Africa’s persevering with disaster of gender-based violence.

South African police recorded 9,782 reported rapes between January and March 2026, together with 12,590 sexual offences. That quantities to roughly 108 reported rapes each day.

Nearly half of these reported rapes, 4,620, or 47.2 %, occurred on the residence of the sufferer or the perpetrator, in keeping with police statistics.

In November final yr, the Nationwide Catastrophe Administration Centre labeled gender-based violence and femicide as a nationwide catastrophe following sustained stress from civil society organisations.

Ramaphosa informed the gathering that girls proceed to stay with the specter of violence “within the streets, even of their properties”.

However rights teams say declaring a catastrophe is barely a primary step.

Dorasamy stated Amnesty Worldwide had heard accounts from ladies who struggled to open circumstances, have been dismissed when reporting violence or acquired little info after making complaints.

Some ladies ultimately withdraw their circumstances, she stated, as a result of the method turns into so tough and exhausting that they now not see a profit in persevering with.

The financial divide

The financial image is equally uneven.

South Africa’s unemployment charge stood at 32.7 % within the first quarter of 2026, in keeping with Statistics South Africa. For girls, it was 36.4 %, in contrast with 29.6 % for males. Amongst Black African ladies, the unemployment charge reached 40.5 %.

Ladies have been additionally much less doubtless than males to take part within the labour power, at 53.8 % in contrast with 65.6 %.

Amongst folks aged 15 to 24, 39.2 % of younger ladies and women have been neither employed nor in training or coaching, in contrast with 36 % of younger males and boys.

For girls making an attempt to construct impartial lives, unemployment can deepen dependence on family members or companions and make it more durable to assist kids or go away abusive relationships.

In poorer and rural communities, these pressures are sometimes compounded by restricted entry to land, productive assets and dependable public providers.

The roots of these inequalities attain again to apartheid and earlier methods of racial dispossession, which denied Black South Africans entry to land, capital and financial alternative. Ladies confronted further restrictions via discriminatory legal guidelines and social buildings.

Democracy modified the political system, nevertheless it didn’t erase a long time of financial exclusion.

The unfinished promise

That stress was on the centre of Williams-de Bruyn’s speech.

She described ladies as prisoners in their very own properties regardless of the democratic freedoms received after apartheid, and spoke of poverty, homelessness, an absence of unpolluted consuming water and systemic corruption.

“We fought to dismantle the yokes of systemic oppression of ladies as a race, class and gender,” she stated.

She acquired a standing ovation.

The commemorations additionally took on a global dimension with the attendance of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

Ramaphosa praised Yousafzai’s braveness and used the event to specific solidarity with ladies and women in Afghanistan who’ve been systematically excluded from training, employment and public life.

However it was Williams-de Bruyn’s reflections that lingered lengthy after the speeches had ended.

Seventy years after that march, ladies maintain positions of energy that may have been nearly unimaginable underneath apartheid. But for hundreds of thousands, violence, unemployment, poverty and insufficient public providers nonetheless form what freedom means in on a regular basis life.

“This isn’t the liberty we marched for.”