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NEWS
Women’s struggle not over
Editorial: Sunday Times (SA) 06 August 2006

On Wednesday August 9, it will be 50 years since Lilian Ngoyi led a march of 20000 women to the Union Buildings to protest against the notorious pass laws. The chant “Now you have touched the women, Strijdom! You have struck a rock” may have been directed at a recalcitrant apartheid-era prime minister, but it still has resonance today.

Prime Minister JG Strijdom and the pass laws are no more, and women’s rights are entrenched in our constitution, but South African women are still drawing the short end. The spiralling cases of sexual assault, rape and violence against women by men show that women still need to fight back.

This week a University of Johannesburg sociologist found that girls are raised to perform far more chores and undertake more responsibilities than boys, who are raised with far fewer restrictions, resulting in more women entering tertiary education who perform better than men. If the sociologist is to believed, it all starts in the home.

If boys are taught to work hard at washing dishes and doing their homework instead of being let loose on the streets, where the most brutal bully or tsotsi is the strongest role model, we may just see a more decent South African man emerge. If on Women’s Day we pause to reflect on how to fix the sexist psyche of South African men, we might just come up with a blueprint for a society that resembles the tenets of our Constitution, where men and women can roam the streets freely as equals.