They Carried More Than Petitions
On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest apartheid’s pass laws. They carried petitions, but that was only part of what they brought with them. They carried the weight of homes dependent on their income, children who needed them, communities constrained by the state and the daily indignity of a system designed to control their movement, labour and futures.
The march was organised through the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) by women whose leadership had already been forged in trade unions, political organisations and community networks. Lilian Ngoyi, a trade unionist and the first woman elected to the ANC’s National Executive Committee, was one of the march’s principal leaders. Rahima Moosa and Helen Joseph were also key organisers, while 18-year-old Sophia Williams-De Bruyn was the youngest of the four women who led the march to the Union Buildings. Among the thousands who joined them was Bertha Gxowa, a trade unionist who later served in South Africa’s democratic Parliament.
When they stood in silence for 30 minutes, it was not passive. It was refusal. It was discipline. It was power made visible. Seventy years later, the words born from that moment still hold their force: Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo, you strike a woman, you strike a rock. But perhaps it is time to question what we mean when we call women rocks. Rocks are expected to withstand pressure. They are not expected to need rest, safety, support or relief. Women do.
The Work That Keeps the Country Moving
South Africa still depends on women’s labour to keep moving. Women carry Mzansi in ways that are easy to praise and even easier to overlook. They are often the first to wake and the last to rest, the ones who make a plan when there is no plan. They stretch salaries, raise children, care for parents, manage homes, build businesses, lead teams and hold communities together when institutions fail.
Much of this work happens out of sight. Before a nurse begins her shift, before a manager enters a meeting, before a teacher opens her classroom or an entrepreneur starts her day, there is often another shift already completed: lunches packed, uniforms washed, children delivered, care arranged and crises absorbed.
The economy runs on this work, yet it is rarely treated as economic work. It is expected as a duty rather than recognised as a contribution. We have made a habit of calling women resilient. We say it with admiration, often sincerely. But resilience becomes a dangerous compliment when it gives everyone else permission to step back. A woman surviving impossible conditions is not proof that those conditions are acceptable. Her ability to cope should not become an excuse for a country, a company or a family to offer less support.
Equality Must Be Felt in Everyday Life
For many women, empowerment is not an abstract idea. It is the difference between getting home safely and navigating unsafe transport routes. It is access to childcare that makes work possible. It is being able to apply for funding without being dismissed, secure a contract without having the right connections, or advance at work without being penalised for becoming a mother.
For a woman commuting long distances, earning a low wage and returning home to a second shift of care, equality must mean something practical. For the informal trader building an income one sale at a time, it means safer trading spaces, affordable finance and reliable services. For women in rural communities, it means access to land, markets, healthcare, connectivity and education.
Sizani Ngubane made these demands tangible for rural women. Through the Rural Women’s Movement, which she founded, she organised women in KwaZulu-Natal around land, property and constitutional rights, insisting that rural women should be decision-makers in matters affecting their lives and communities.
Dignity cannot live only in policies, speeches and social-media posts. It must show up in the everyday conditions of women’s lives.
Beyond Women’s Month Statements
If organisations are serious about women’s advancement, they need to move beyond August campaigns, branded panels and statements of intent. They need to close pay gaps, promote women into roles with real influence and build workplaces that do not treat caregiving as a woman’s private inconvenience.
They need to invest in women-owned businesses, open procurement opportunities and challenge the old networks through which capital, contracts and career opportunities are too often distributed. Women are also building economic power in fields that once excluded them. Bridgette Radebe founded Mmakau Mining, a pioneering Black-owned mining company. Wendy Luhabe helped establish Wiphold, an early women-owned investment company, while Ntsiki Biyela became South Africa’s first Black female winemaker before founding Aslina Wines. Their examples show why empowerment requires more than recognition: it requires access to capital, contracts, ownership and markets.
Women need cultures where women can speak directly, lead confidently and set boundaries without being labelled difficult. And men have a role that cannot be outsourced. Gender equality is not a women’s initiative. It is a leadership responsibility, a household responsibility and a social responsibility. It is reflected in who gets heard in meetings, who gets promoted, who does the care work and who pays the price for everyone else’s convenience.
A Legacy That Moves Us Forward
The women who marched in 1956 did not ask to be admired for their strength. They demanded dignity. They demanded freedom. They demanded the right to move through their own country without permission from a violent state. Their legacy is not simply that women can endure hardship. It is that women can organise, lead, build and transform a nation when they decide that the world as it is will not be the world they accept.
For 70 years, women have held Mzansi up, in public and in private, through paid work and unpaid care, through leadership, love, sacrifice and sheer determination. They have made possibility out of scarcity. They have raised generations to dream beyond their circumstances. They have turned pain into purpose, silence into action and closed doors into paths for others to follow.
That legacy is visible in younger women too. In 2016, schoolgirl Zulaikha Patel helped lead protests at Pretoria High School for Girls against discriminatory hair rules, turning an everyday school experience into a national conversation about race, identity and dignity. Like the women of 1956, she showed how a specific injustice can become a wider demand for change.
The task before us is not to keep asking women to be stronger. It is to match their courage with action: to build a South Africa where every woman can move freely, earn fairly, lead boldly, live safely and dream without limits. Because when women are supported, heard and given room to rise, they do not rise alone. They lift families, teams, businesses, communities and whole generations with them.
Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo.
Not only a warning, but a promise, the future of Mzansi will be stronger, fairer and more fearless because women are shaping it.
