The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

Previous literature has either excluded or diminished the role of motherhood in female political activism. However, South Africa’s high fertility rate, averaging six children per woman in 1950, suggests that most women were mothers during apartheid. Drawing upon memoirs, interviews, anti-apartheid pamphlets, and newspapers, this paper examines the intersection of motherhood and activism in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Mothers faced the combined burdens of motherhood, patriarchy, and apartheid. With a husband oftentimes absent and laws that patriarchal norms reinforced, most mothers bore the brunt of household and familial duties, including financially supporting their families. They jumped over hurdles unique to their identity as women, restricted in terms of earning an income and having agency within the activism movement. They also faced emotional challenges as anti-apartheid activism encompassed imprisonment, to which mothers, who were held responsible for childcare, had profound emotional responses. Mothers fought against apartheid in the face of disempowerment, profound sorrow, and guilt, both within the bounds of their femininity as the nation’s “mothers,” and outside the bounds of femininity as protestors, trade unionists, MK members, and prisoners. This paper demonstrates that motherhood was a powerful force that not only acted as a political tool for women to criticize apartheid but also as fuel driving women’s resistance, reshaping the meaning of motherhood as a source of strength for female activists rather than as an impediment.