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ABSTRACT
In this paper I look at the way in which women in a South African township practice their ‘agency’ in their personal lives, in their economic activity, and in their community commitments. In the post-apartheid period, women enjoy a supportive policy environment and an extraordinary increase in women’s representation in political spaces, yet the ANC led state has not maintained ‘invited’ spaces for women to engage with the structural conditions of gender inequality at the local level. Nevertheless, we find extraordinary accounts of women creatively ‘practicing’ their agency. I explore the way in which women push the boundaries of effective agency despite the conditions of oppression that characterise the broader social, economic, and political context. I show how the women face many obstacles to effecting transformative agency, but nevertheless carve out their independence through consciously determining the way in which they carry out their daily activities in collective and individual ways.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Vishwas Satgar, Srila Roy, Glyn Williams, and Jackie Cock for comments on an earlier draft. Finally, thanks to two extraordinarily helpful blind reviewers for their engaged and thorough comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Michelle Williams is Associate Professor in Sociology at Wits University, and is the Chairperson of the Global Labour University (GLU) Programme, also at Wits. Her books include The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala (Palgrave 2008). She edited South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South (with Isabel Hofmeyr, Wits University Press, 2011), Labour in the Global South: Challenges and Alternatives for Workers (with Sarah Mosoetsa, ILO Press 2012), Marxisms in the twenty-first Century: crisis, critique, and struggle (with Vishwas Satgar, Wits University Press, 2013), and The End of the Developmental State? (Routledge, 2014).
Notes
1. Consensual myths are similar to the concept of consensual illusions developed by Sandoval Citation2000, 63.
2. After 1994 South Africa was sub-divided into nine provinces. Before 1994, however, there were four provinces: the Cape, Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal. What is now the province of Gauteng was previously part of Transvaal.
3. Legalising informal settlements meant that residents could apply for title deeds and the state would provide basic services such as sanitation and water to the community (if not always directly to the house site).
4. The two younger women in their late twenties we interviewed grew up largely in urban townships and did not have strong ties to the rural areas.
5. The relation to the ANC is extremely emotive, and many people fluctuate in a love-hate relationship with it. Virginia also demonstrated this. For two years, she consistently told me that she would not vote for the ANC, but after Nelson Mandela died in December 2013 her views shifted. When I met with her in late January 2014, she told me that she would vote for the ANC because it is the party of Mandela and it is her party. She went on to say that she was not voting for the current leadership, but for the ideals that the ANC used to stand by. While this might appear ‘irrational’ as her vote would technically be in favour of the current leadership, for her the division was clear. She was voting for the ANC she loved, the ANC of Mandela, not the current ANC.