Black Women Freedom Fighters in South Africa and in the United States: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

From the beginning of civilization, resisting oppression has been a manifestation of women’s experience throughout the cultures of the world. The imposition of a male filter upon modern Western societies’ views of women as “the weaker sex” explained away the actions of female freedom fighters as enigmatic. Such women were analyzed as exceptional females who, because of a crisis, stepped outside of their roles as women and acted as though they were men. This androcentric political interpretation continued through much of nineteenth and twentieth century thought and may have contributed to the apolitical behavior of many women. Not until the 1970s onset of Women’s History as a legitimate field of study was this interpretation challenged and revised by historians. Until the mid 1980s, with the publication of Gray Okihiro’s anthology In Resistance, the application of this revised view of women in resistance seemed to be centered around the study of Western women, not women of the so-called Third World. In Resistance contains four essays on women of Africa or the African diaspora whose female authors see women’s forms of resistance in gender related ways.¹