Rights and Realities: limits to women's rights and citizenship after 10 years of democracy in South Africa

Hames, Mary

doi:10.1080/01436590600933685

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…The institutionalization of gender equality in state institutions, combined with women's increased legislative representation, resulted in major legislative victories for women (Hames 2006;Walsh 2006). During the five years following transition, a series of acts were passed that, among other things, addressed sexual harassment in the workplace, provided extensive maternal and family responsibility leaves, promoted affirmative action for women in hiring, gave women greater access to abortion, required financial support from absent parents, criminalized domestic violence, and provided free health care to pregnant women and children up to age 6.…”

Section: International Influencesthe Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States: A Framework for Comparison

2008

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W ith the recent wave of democratization across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, scholars have begun to explore how democratic changes affect women. Like other analyses of gender and the state (Brush 2003;Eisenstein 1988;MacKinnon 1989;Orloff 1996;Pateman 1988), these studies examine how states create and govern gender relations among their citizens through institutions, laws, and legal discourses (Jaquette and Wolchick 1998;Stephen 1997;Waylen 1994Waylen , 2000. Importantly, they extend previous gendered state literature by asking what happens to the political institutionalization of gender when a state is transformed by democratic transition.There are strong theoretical reasons to anticipate that democratic transitions will create more gender equitable states. First, democratic transitions provide women (and men) with new opportunities for political participation. Second, new participatory opportunities typically coincide with the negotiation and implementation of new state institutions and policies.There is a rich collection of case studies examining the relationship between democratization, women's movements, and gendered state outcomes, but the variation across cases is still poorly understood. In response, this article develops a theoreticallygrounded comparative framework to evaluate and explain cross-national variations in the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions. The framework highlights four theoretical factors-the context of the transition, the legacy of women's previous mobilizations, political parties, and international influences-that together shape the political openings and ideologies available to women's movements in transitional states. Applying the framework to four test cases, we conclude that women's movements are most effective at targeting democratizing states when transitions are complete, when women's movements develop cohesive coalitions, when the ideology behind the transition (rather than the ideology of the winning regime) aligns easily with feminist frames, and when women's past activism legitimates present-day feminist demands. These findings challenge current conceptualizations of how democratic transitions affect gender in state institutions and provide a comparative framework for evaluating variation across additional cases.

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Section: International Influencesthe Southmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States: A Framework for Comparison

2008

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“…In post-colonial Africa, "women are citizens according to national constitutions and they usually have the right to vote" (Schlyter, 2009: 11). However, the literature points to manifold challenges in African women's efforts to access or fully exercise their citizen rights (Gouws, 2005;Hames, 2006;Nyamu-Musembi, 2007;Schlyter, 2009). Women's movements for peace (Gbowee, 2011) for national liberation (Hassim 2006;Tripp et al, 2008), for suffrage (Ramtohul, 2015), and against homophobia (Salo & Gqola, 2006) have drawn from feminist theorising during the 1990s that has analysed citizenship "as plural and multilayered, embodying the recognition of multiple identities and associated new claims for distributing and redistributing the rights and practices linked with citizenship" (Young, 1990, cited in Perreira, 2005.…”

Section: Gender and Citizenship In The African Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

Oldfield

Mathsaka²,

Salo

et al. 2019

Urbani Izziv

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How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.

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“…All these issues are context bound and relevant to the San community in Botswana. There are many instances where women in Africa, for instance, have legal rights, but custom, culture and tradition prohibit women's claims to property and land use (Hames 2006). So, although international agencies may support the distributional justice of making available micro-credit for poor women, this may not translate into freedoms or recognition of the women's lack of access to profitable markets or bank accounts because their husband denies them permission to open one.…”

Section: Social Justice and Lifelong Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lifelong Learning for Poverty Eradication

Raditloaneng¹,

Chawawa²

2015

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Rights and Realities: limits to women's rights and citizenship after 10 years of democracy in South Africa

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States: A Framework for Comparison

Democratization, Women's Movements, and Gender-Equitable States: A Framework for Comparison

In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

Lifelong Learning for Poverty Eradication

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