Gender Differences: Struggles Around "Needs" and "Rights" in South Africa

������ �� This article analyses the Women’s National Coalition which was established in South Africa in 1992 and successfully mobilized thousands of women to demand equal rights in the new post-apartheid order. The success of the coalition rested on an acknowledgement of difference and raises important questions regarding both the limits and the possibilities of feminist struggles. New attempts at building coalitions between women separated by their differences can succeed if the differences are acknowledged and respected, even as alliances are formed, through partial goals on which there is a commonality. This surely characterizes the Charter Campaign of the Women’s National Coalition (WNC) in South Africa between 1992 and 1994. It is an important illustration of a coalition arising from the former, negative apartheid politics of difference. Moreover, the WNC stands in marked contrast to several failed attempts in the United States to build similar kinds of coalitions. The WNC provided an inspirational and paradoxical example of women’s unity. In this sense, contemporary South Africa raises important questions regarding both the limits and the possibilities of feminist struggle. In the past, the exploitative nature of relations between white and black women meant that South Africa presented a challenge to any notion of “sisterhood.” This exploitation was most visible in the space within which white and black women most frequently interacted—the institution of domestic service (see, Cock 1989). The wages paid, long hours of work, and demeaning treatment suggested a strong level of exploitation of black maids by white madams. In addition, feminism—until very recently—was viewed by many anti-apartheid activists as a contaminated ideology. It was understood to mean women organizing separately from, and antagonistically toward, men, and was widely perceived as divisive, alien, and elitist, operating to obscure the very real differences between women. A pragmatic unity among women within the WNC was brought about not in the name of feminism but by a shared sense of women’s exclusion from the negotiation process that marked South Africa’s transition from authoritarian rule. That shared sense of exclusion was the generative force behind the formation of the coalition in 1992. The WNC represents a watershed in the history of women’s struggles in South Africa. It was formed in April 1992, when some 70 women’s organizations came together to identify women’s needs, priorities, and