A Difficult History of Public Motherhood in South Africa

Debates about the politics of motherhood were integral to the development of critical feminist scholarship in apartheid South Africa, and remain urgent today. Yet these debates have been limited by foundational misconceptions of the historical relationship between public motherhood and state power. By “public motherhood,” I refer to participation on the explicit basis of maternal authority, in spaces of collective discussion and debate. By the twentieth century, South African women were using public motherhood in two ways: to make demands on the state, and to get around the state to ensure the well-being of themselves and their families and communities. Before the rise of apartheid in 1948, both black and white women often used the language of social welfare and public health to engage with the state. In 1954, the Federation of South African Women grew out of, and demonstrated continuities with, this history of maternal authority. But the register in which FEDSAW engaged with and circumvented the state was defiantly political, as seen in its participation in the World Congress of Mothers of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and in two famous marches on Pretoria. The politicization of public motherhood reflected new forms of both state repression and global legitimation of political motherhood. By reexamining the Federation of South African Women from newly intertwined global and local perspectives, this essay provides a feminist history of the politicization of public motherhood, in a part of the world where maternal activism powerfully countered a state predicated on racist and gendered oppression.