SEVENTY YEARS AFTER THE MARCH, SOUTH AFRICA’S WOMEN STILL WAIT FOR EQUALITY TO ARRIVE
One in three South African women aged 18 and older has experienced physical violence in her lifetime. That single figure, drawn from the country’s first national gender-based violence study, captures a fundamental gap: laws have changed, but the behaviours and attitudes governing women’s daily lives have not. One in five men admits to perpetrating physical or sexual intimate partner violence. The numbers are not abstractions. They are the measure of how far delivery has fallen short of promise.
This contradiction sits at the heart of South Africa’s Women’s Day, which marks 70 years since 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria on August 9, 1956. The march was called to oppose pass laws that the apartheid regime sought to extend to African women. Domestic workers understood immediately what was at stake: the little freedom of movement they possessed would be stripped away. Police would be able to stop and search them at will, just as they already did with African men.
The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and the Women’s League of the African National Congress (ANC) organized the petition and march after months of groundwork. By nine in the morning, thousands of women, most of them Black, had gathered before the office of the Minister for Native Affairs. As a delegation handed over the petition, the women sang directly to Prime Minister JG Strijdom: “Strijdom, you have struck the women, so you have struck a rock!” The chant, which echoes each August 9, works as a call and response. One set of voices cries out, “You have struck a woman,” while another responds, “so, you have struck a rock!”
The choice of Thursday carried its own meaning. In the 1950s and 1960s, white employers gave their Black domestic workers Thursdays off and called the day “Sheila’s Day,” using that generic name to avoid learning their workers’ actual names. The march deliberately reclaimed that day as a moment of collective power.
The immediate goal failed. The pass laws were extended to African women despite the protest. Yet the march catalyzed something far larger: the birth of the South African women’s movement. The defiance of that day provided a blueprint for activism that would shape generations. When apartheid ended in 1994, women who had marched in 1956 remained active in politics, and the movement they had built proved powerful enough that almost a third of the incoming parliament comprised women, placing South Africa among only a handful of countries with such strong female representation.
The daughters of 1956 used that power to push through legal and policy changes on reproductive rights, customary law, marriage, and the rights of domestic workers. South Africa now holds some of the most progressive laws and policies promoting gender equity in the world. More than 30 years after apartheid ended, women still constitute about 45 percent of parliamentarians and 44 percent of ministers. That is a genuine institutional achievement.
What changed less is the material reality below those headline figures. The gap between the rights enjoyed by women in positions of power and the lived experience of women in poor communities is stark. South African women living in poverty face high levels of unemployment, gender-based violence, and poor access to health and education services. Middle-class women enjoy privileges once reserved for whites only. The ANC-led government has done little to dismantle the underlying economic structures that upheld apartheid, leaving the foundations of inequality intact even as the legal framework has been rebuilt around them.
This disconnect between law and life reflects a deeper truth the 1956 marchers understood intuitively, even without the language to fully articulate it. Many had taken to the streets against the objections of their husbands and male comrades. They knew that sexism did not sit neatly outside the struggle against apartheid. Women could stand alongside men in a liberation movement while still having to fight for equality with those same men. That insight became one of the most important legacies of the march.
The lesson remains relevant today. Gender equality cannot be driven by women’s demands alone. Real progress requires call and response. Women have been making the call for 70 years. Whether men, institutions, and governments will finally answer it in practice is the question the next 70 years will have to settle.