Page 286 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

women’s suffrage movements 2063

Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

olution has historically promoted change in class rela-
tions and in the relative power of the state. Histories of
countries such as Vietnam, however, suggest that vast
continuities between pre- and postrevolutionary soci-
eties remained intact. Although women were encour-
aged to participate in revolution, few have made use of
their right to vote or hold political office after the reuni-
fication of the country in 1976. As Vietnamese nation-
alists gained power, they assumed traditional
patriarchal power and dismissed women’s revolutionary
activities and political gains as part and parcel to the cli-
mate of national revolt; thus, as the generation of
women who had participated in the revolution died out,
so did women’s hope for political rights.
In South Africa under apartheid, women have had to
bear the burden of the double-edged sword of racism
and sexism in gaining voting rights. White South
African women won the vote in 1930, women of Asian
or mixed ethnic extraction (“colored”) gained the vote
in 1984, and black South Africans did not receive the
nationalists made concessions to right-wing traditional- vote until 1994, after apartheid was dismantled.
ists. In spite of traditionalists’ resistance, Egyptian Through the 1950s blacks organized through the
women gained the vote in 1956, and during the same African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Man-
year a number of women became minor elected officials. dela. Gertrude Shope, an ANC member and chair of
In 1979, a presidential decree established that thirty one branch of the Federation of South African Women
seats in Egypt’s parliament be reserved for women; the (FEDSAW), organized black women to fight for equal-
president also has the power to appoint a number of rep- ity and voting rights. White political leaders acted
resentatives, a proportion of whom must be women, to quickly to suppress the ANC and other organizations;
parliament. Unfortunately, an upsurge in Islamic funda- Mandela was imprisoned and Shope went into exile,
mentalism has led to constitutional suppression of where she became the secretary to the head of the
women’s public and political space. ANC’s Women’s Section. During the 1970s resistance
In Vietnam, like Egypt, women supported anticolo- resurfaced; the numbers of protestors were larger and
nial revolutionaries during the pre–World War II era, included women, who wanted to end the continuous
and their struggles eventually led to the defeat of French oppression in their daily lives through the achieving of
military forces in 1954, though it was more than 20 voting and political rights. In 1991, as apartheid was
years before Vietnam, divided in 1954, was reunited beginning to crumble, Shope was elected president of
under the Communists. In Communist Vietnam, social- the ANC’s Women’s League. In South Africa’s first free
ist leadership paved the way for Vietnamese women’s elections in 1994, approximately 25 percent of South
activism in political spaces. Women’s newly formed Africa’s legislative seats were won by women. Despite
public identities as warriors and liberators merged with these gains, persistent poverty and social ills, most
their private identities as mothers and keepers of notably the AIDS epidemic, continue to negatively
national heritage. Scholars have argued that social rev- impact the lives of South Africa’s women.