Provides a new perspective on the struggle against apartheid, and contributes to key debates in South African history, gender inequality, sexual violence, and the legacies of the liberation struggle.

"In this compelling study, Rebekah Lee explores the process and consequences of settlement through the everyday lives and testimonies of three generations of African women in Cape Town during the apartheid (1948-94) and post-apartheid periods. How did African women experience apartheid? How did they create a sense of belonging in a city that actively denied and resisted their presence? Through detailed analyses of women's management of domestic economies, their participation in township social organizations, their home renovation priorities and patterns of energy use, this study evokes a larger history of gendered and generational struggles over identity, place and belonging. It provides a deeper and more nuanced understanding of African women in apartheid and post-apartheid society, and of urbanization in South Africa. Drawing together scholarship and new methodologies from anthropology, history, human geography and development studies, "African Women and Apartheid" will be valuable to anyone with interests in South Africa, gender, urbanization, the African family, oral history and memory."--Bloomsbury publishing.

Women in Solitary offers a new account based around the narratives of four women who experienced detention and torture in South Africa in the late 1960s when the regime tried to stage a trial to convict leading anti-apartheid activists. This timely book not only accords the four women and others their place in the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa, but also weaves their experiences into the historical development of the anti-apartheid movement. The book draws on extended interviews with journalist Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin, trade unionists Shanthie Naidoo and Rita Ndzanga and activist Nondwe Mankahla. Winnie Mandela’s account of her time in detention is drawn from earlier published accounts. The narrative brings to light the unrelentingly brutal and comprehensive character of the attempt to silence resistance and break the spirit of the activists, both to disrupt organisation and to intimidate communities. It is testament to the triumph and strength of conviction that the women displayed. It also reflects the comprehensive nature of the resistance. The women fought not only as organisers, recruiters or couriers, but also in solitary confinement, resisting all its deprivations, the taunts by interrogators and anxieties about their children. And when they took the fight into the courtroom, they prevailed. The book weaves their experiences into the historical development of the struggle in a way that highlights broader issues, drawing out the particular ways in which women’s experience of activism and repression differs from that of men, in terms both of the behaviour of the police and of the women’s ties with community, family and children. The book’s broad timespan underpins the psychological effects of sustained solitary confinement and its traumatic legacy, asking whether, by not attending more consistently to healing the trauma done to a generation by brutal repression, we allow it to contribute to social ills that worry us today. Women in Solitary is ideal reading for anyone interested in the history of apartheid, the criminalisation of activism, and women’s imprisonment, as well as scholars and students of penal and feminist studies.

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women’s education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students’ experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women’s social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education—introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

How have white Afrikaans-speaking women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy? Have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class? Sitting Pretty explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid and the volksmoeder.

This book investigates women’s political activism and conflict in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, using play texts, alongside interviews with female playwrights and women who worked within the theatre, to examine issues around domestic violence, racial abuse and women in detention without trial.