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AUG/SEPT 2014 • www.cosatu.org.za

a common struggle but which is pursued by people whose starting point is not the same and whose objective coincide and at some stage differ in content and essence.

I only differ with Kollontai where she concludes that proletariat women must lead the struggle separate and in exclusion of others such as the liberal feminists. In the South African ccontext that may be suicidal. In South Africa we still need all components and strata of women to come together under one

only in a world of socialised labour, of harmony and justice. The feminists are unwilling and incapable of understanding this; it seems to them that when equality is formally accepted by the letter of the law they will be able to win a comfortable place for themselves in the old world of oppression, enslavement and

For an example the context of oppression for white women is not

the same as that of black women and that is why we question Employment Equity which treats white women as the same as black women. Even the Employment Equity report shows that since 1994 white women have bene fi ted disproportionately when compared to their black counterparts. Black women are yet to be liberated from the triple oppression. Most white women earn in the region of R9 600 per month, whereas most African women earn R1 200 per month. The racial income gap in monthly incomes among women is therefore R8 400. The race gap is also felt by the majority of African males. The gap in monthly income between African men and White women is R7 200[24]. In addition, 56% of Whites earn no less than R6 000 per month whereas 81% of Africans earn no more than R6 000 per month.

bondage, of tears and hardship. And this is true up to a certain point. For the majority of women of the proletariat, equal rights with men would mean only an equal share in inequality, but for the “chosen few”, for the bourgeois women, it would indeed open doors to new and unprecedentedrights and privileges that until now have been enjoyed by men of the bourgeois class alone. But each new concession won by the bourgeois woman would give her yet another weapon for the exploitation of her younger sister

umbrella to pronounce their common positions. It is a fact that given the racial and colonial history of this country we will continue to be confronted by a reality of

and would go on increasing the division between the women of the two opposite social camps. Their interests would be more sharply in con fl ict, their aspirations more obviously in contradiction.

A similar story can be told between the middle class and the working class black woman. They are not the same, actually since 1994 there has been a

Gender Agenda