South African women did not need another Women’s Month filled with speeches about empowerment while millions remain trapped by unemployment, poverty wages, violence, inadequate housing, collapsing public services and the burden of unpaid care.
What working-class women need is organisation and struggle.
The conditions facing women today are not the result of a shortage of inspirational role models or too few women in boardrooms and parliament. They arise from a society in which enormous wealth exists alongside mass poverty, women’s labour is systematically undervalued, and the cost of every social crisis is pushed back into working-class households.
These conditions will not disappear through commemorations. They have to be fought.
That is why the seventieth anniversary of the historic Women’s March of 9 August 1956 matters. Around 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria against the extension of the pass laws to African women. They did not wait for those in power to recognise the injustice of the pass system. They organised, mobilised and confronted it collectively.
Seventy years later, the most important lesson of that march is not simply that women were courageous. It is that organised women can become a social force capable of changing history.
That is the tradition we need to rebuild today.
Women were resisting long before 1956
The 1956 march did not appear from nowhere. In 1913, African women gathered at Waaihoek in Bloemfontein to resist attempts to force them to carry residential passes. They marched on government offices, returned their passes and confronted arrest.
In the 1920s and 1930s, impoverished young Afrikaner women were driven from the countryside into Johannesburg’s garment factories. Young women who had been expected to become respectable volksmoeders instead found themselves confronting low wages, long hours and harsh factory conditions. Through the Garment Workers Union, strikes and collective organisation, many developed into militant trade unionists.
This history should not be romanticised. The super-exploitation of the black working class — a central source of capitalist wealth — was built on white supremacy, which granted white workers privileges that helped provide a social base for the class exploitation and national oppression of the black majority. But the experience of these Afrikaner women also revealed that racial privilege did not shield them from class exploitation. Their organisation in a trade union demonstrated that workers are not prisoners of the ideas with which they enter struggle. Collective struggle can transform consciousness.
Women also played a prominent role in the Durban strike wave of 1973, often at great personal cost. Women activists, including within the Indian community, confronted not only the apartheid state and employers but patriarchal oppression and violence in asserting their place in the working class. The Durban strikes helped revive militant working-class organisation after years of apartheid repression and laid foundations for the trade-union movement that eventually produced COSATU in 1985.
The history of South African women is therefore not simply a history of oppression. It is a history of resistance, organisation and struggle against triple oppression — as women, as black people and as workers. That is the tradition Women’s Month should recover.
Formal equality is not liberation
The defeat of apartheid won formal political equality for men and women of all races. Discriminatory laws were abolished. Reproductive and employment rights were extended. Women entered professions, universities, public office and occupations previously closed to them. These were important victories.
But capitalism remained. The mines, banks, farms, factories and giant retail corporations remained overwhelmingly under private ownership and control. The preservation of capitalism meant that the enormous inequalities developed under colonialism and apartheid continued into the democratic era, even as their legal form changed.
The imposition of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme (GEAR) in 1996 — building on an economic-policy shift already under way during the closing stages of apartheid — accelerated this course. Public spending was subjected to ‘fiscal discipline’: spending restraints and budget cuts, together with outsourcing and commercialisation of public services. Instead of public policy being organised around meeting social need, it was increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capitalist market, that is, profit.
Today austerity is presented as though it were an unavoidable response to an unfortunate shortage of money. But there is no shortage of wealth in society. Neoliberal policy has shifted resources towards private profit while constraining the resources available for social need. When a teaching post remains vacant, children do not stop needing education. When a clinic is understaffed, people do not stop becoming sick. When affordable childcare is unavailable, children do not cease needing care.
The work does not disappear. It is transferred elsewhere and much of it eventually lands in working-class households, where women disproportionately perform it without pay. At the same time, the prioritisation of debt servicing intensifies the pressure to cut social spending further. Austerity therefore redistributes the burden of capitalist crisis downwards: the contradiction between private profit and social need is resolved at the expense of the working class.
This is why the struggle for women’s liberation cannot be reduced to obtaining equal legal rights or increasing the number of women occupying powerful positions. A woman can have the legal right to leave a violent relationship but have nowhere else to live. She can have reproductive rights but be unable to obtain a termination of pregnancy at the public facility available to her. She can have the right to work while being unable to find a job. She can have a job and still earn too little to live.
Formal equality, without the material means to exercise it is greatly limited. Nor can reforms already won be assumed to be permanent. In the United States, the federal constitutional protection of abortion rights established in 1973 was overturned in 2022, almost fifty years later. Women in Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere have likewise faced restrictions and reversals of rights previously exercised.
We fight for reforms under capitalism and defend them. But no gain is permanently guaranteed unless there is an organised social force capable of defending it. In periods of capitalist crisis, reforms and rights won through earlier struggle come under renewed attack. The assault on women’s rights internationally is therefore not separate from the wider offensive against the working class. Ultimately, securing women’s liberation requires the socialist transformation of society.
The crisis has a class character
Women across social classes can experience sexism, discrimination, sexual harassment and violence. But women do not confront these conditions with equal resources. A wealthy woman can purchase childcare, healthcare, transport, security and legal representation. She may possess property and independent income. She can employ another woman to perform domestic and care work.
A working-class woman has far fewer individual means of escaping the conditions confronting her. This is why class cannot simply be treated as one identity alongside race, sex or sexuality. The working class occupies a particular position within capitalism because workers collectively produce the goods and services upon which society depends. That gives workers a potential social power no oppressed group possesses simply because it is oppressed.
Workers can stop production. Organised as a class, they also have the potential to take control of production and reorganise society on an entirely different basis.
This is why the struggle for women’s liberation must be rooted above all among working-class women. The unemployed woman is part of the working class. So is the pensioner who spent her life working, the informal worker, the student preparing to enter working life and the woman performing hours of unpaid labour maintaining a working-class household.
Who produces the wealth — and who gets it?
Nowhere is the class character of women’s inequality clearer than at work. Women are concentrated in domestic work, retail, agriculture, cleaning, hospitality, ECD, healthcare and other forms of care work. These workers perform labour without which society could not function. Yet the majority remain poor.
The existence of a statutory minimum wage does not answer the fundamental question: can a worker actually live on it? Food must be bought. Rent must be paid. Electricity, water and transport cost money. Children require clothing, food and education. Workers need healthcare, communication and some possibility of participating fully in social life.
That is why the Marxist Workers Party is putting forward the demand for a minimum wage of R15,000 a month as an immediate step towards a genuine living wage.
Employers will say it is unaffordable. Then open the books. Show workers the profits. Show the dividends. Show executive remuneration. Show where the wealth produced by millions of workers actually goes. The question behind every wage struggle is ultimately: who produces society’s wealth, who receives it and who decides how it is used?
Women cannot be liberated by transferring their burden to other women
The care crisis exposes another contradiction. Women have entered paid employment in enormous numbers, but the work required to maintain human life has not disappeared.
Children still need care. Food must still be prepared. Homes must be maintained. Older and sick people require support. South Africa has developed a particularly stark way of resolving this contradiction. Even sections of the lower middle class and better-paid working class employ domestic workers. One woman can therefore escape part of her domestic burden by paying a poorer woman to carry it. But the domestic worker has children, a household and care responsibilities of her own.
The burden has moved between women. It has not been abolished.
The alternative is to socialise care. We need universal free quality ECD, publicly funded childcare, eldercare, disability services, healthcare and community care. ECD practitioners and Community Health Workers should be properly trained and permanently employed as public-sector workers on living wages.
Women’s liberation requires changing not only who performs care but how society organises responsibility for care itself.
Violence cannot be separated from material conditions
South Africa’s epidemic levels of violence against women, girls and LGBTQI+ people demand emergency action. Perpetrators must be held responsible for their actions. But legislation and policing alone cannot eliminate violence. A woman escaping an abusive partner needs somewhere to live. She needs an income. If she has children, she needs childcare. She needs healthcare, counselling and legal assistance.
Without these material resources, the formal right to leave becomes almost meaningless. This is why struggles against GBV cannot be separated from struggles for housing, jobs, wages and public services. It is also why working-class organisations themselves must confront sexism, sexual harassment and abuse within their own ranks.
No trade-union leader, political activist or respected comrade can be placed above the standards for which our movement fights.
We need a new movement of working-class women
Women are already fighting. Domestic workers organise over wages and conditions. ECD practitioners fight for recognition and proper funding. Communities resist electricity and water cut-offs. Women campaign against GBV. Workers fight retrenchments and outsourcing. Students challenge academic exclusions, sexual harassment and discrimination.
The problem is not the absence of struggle.
The problem is its fragmentation.
What is missing is a movement capable of connecting these struggles, generalising their lessons and fighting around a common programme.
The Marxist Workers Party Women’s Committee has been developing a Platform for the Liberation of Working-Class Women as a contribution towards building such a movement. The Platform is currently being discussed within the party and will be released for wider discussion in the coming week.
We do not intend to present it as the final programme of a movement that does not yet exist. Nor do we propose that the MWP Women’s Committee should declare itself the women’s movement. The Platform is intended to begin a discussion about what a new working-class women’s movement should fight for, how it should organise and how the struggles already taking place can be brought together.
But that discussion does not have to wait for the Platform.
We are inviting women who believe that such a movement is needed—or who simply want to explore the idea—to begin engaging with us now. You do not have to belong to the MWP, belong to another organisation or already consider yourself an activist. Tell us what issues concern you, what struggles you are already involved in, and what you think a new movement of working-class women should fight for.
Once the Platform is released, we invite you to read it, criticise it and suggest changes. Then, on Saturday, 3 October 2026, we will hold our first open discussion to begin exploring together the practical steps towards building such a movement.
If this article has made you ask, “What can I do?”, this is the first step: register your interest, read and discuss the Platform when it is released, and come to the meeting on 3 October. What happens next should be decided collectively.
The Platform proposes struggles around a R15,000 minimum wage; permanent jobs and a massive programme of public employment; universal free ECD and socialised care; properly funded healthcare, housing and services; measures to combat violence against women, girls and LGBTQI+ people; adequate social grants and income protection; and the rebuilding of women’s organisation and leadership throughout the working class.
These demands are not a shopping list for government. They are demands around which people can organise and struggle. A fight for childcare raises the question of public expenditure. A struggle over public expenditure raises the question of austerity. A struggle against austerity raises the question of who controls society’s wealth. A wage struggle exposes the gulf between workers’ wages and the profits and executive incomes produced from their labour. A struggle over the distribution of that wealth raises the question of ownership and control — and ultimately places before society the choice between capitalism and socialism.
This is how immediate struggles can become schools in which wider political conclusions are drawn.
Seventy years later: organise
We fight for every reform that improves the lives of working-class women. But women’s liberation cannot ultimately be achieved by securing a larger share for women within the existing hierarchy. Capitalist society is divided fundamentally between the ruling capitalist class and the exploited working class. Women are not a class on their own any more than men are: a minority of women form part of the ruling class, while the majority are part of the working class.
We do not fight so that women can become equally represented among the exploiters while millions of working-class women remain exploited.
Capitalism depends upon workers’ labour while placing the wealth they produce under the control of a small owning class. It depends upon the reproduction and care of human beings while shifting enormous amounts of that labour onto households and overwhelmingly onto women.
Women’s liberation therefore ultimately requires the socialist transformation of society. To achieve it, working-class women and men of all genders must unite. Seventy years after the historic march of 1956, we should honour its participants by recovering its most important lesson.
They organised. Now a new generation must do the same.
Organise women in every workplace and community.
Unite struggles that capitalism keeps divided.
Build a fighting movement of working-class women.
Fight for socialism and the liberation of all.
Take the first step: join the discussion
If you want to explore how a new working-class women’s movement could be built, join the MWP Women’s Committee’s first open discussion. You do not need to be an MWP member or already be politically active. Come with your experiences, questions and ideas.
Date: 10th October, 2026 Time: 10.00 Venue: TBC/ online link: MWP is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Women’s Draft Platform Meeting
Time: 10th Oct, 2026 10:00 AM Harare, Pretoria
MWP is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82624120352?pwd=9X2tZPOkDrp2HbYVGbNky0qUdObfbt.1
Meeting chat link
https://us06web.zoom.us/launch/jc/82624120352
Meeting ID: 826 2412 0352
Passcode: 285257
Contact: Sheri, 0830346352
Can’t attend but want to be involved? Complete the short response form using the Google Form link or QR code when published.
Google Form / QR code: online link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHrjGHIzDaDW-TzojH3VdcqvPSLkN_XQU_ddWryct3ArbJ0g/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=107294973196706112922