70 Years After Historic Women’s March, South African Women Say Freedom Is Unfinished

South Africa on Sunday commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Women’s March of 1956, when around 20,000 women of all races marched to Pretoria to protest apartheid laws that forced Black women to carry passes restricting their movement. The demonstration became a landmark in the struggle against white minority rule.

Yet seven decades later, many women say their fight for freedom remains incomplete. They continue to face high rates of gender-based violence, poverty, and inequality. A 2024 study supported by UN Women found that more than one in three South African women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

Ramnie Dinat, 84, was a teenager during the march. She helped her mother, anti-apartheid activist Ama Naidoo, organize women ahead of the rally. Black women, women of Indian heritage, and some white women marched together that day. “Black women were organizing, and Indian women couldn’t be silent,” Dinat recalled. “We were ordinary women who believed we could make a difference.”

The Women’s Jail in Johannesburg, once a cornerstone of apartheid’s prison system, now stands as a museum near the Constitutional Court. Many march leaders and participants were later imprisoned there, held separately by race. Nolubabalo Memese, Visitors Services Manager at Constitution Hill, said the prison was “designed to break, humiliate, dehumanize.” Black women were denied underwear and sanitary towels.

Memese noted that the museum honors both famous figures like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Albertina Sisulu, and the thousands of ordinary women whose sacrifices went unnoticed. “Our freedom is built on the shoulders of those kinds of women,” she said.

Paralympic tennis champion Kgothatso Montjane, 40, who won the 2024 Wimbledon wheelchair doubles title, said the 1956 marchers “paved the way for us.” She is the first Black South African woman to compete in all four major tennis tournaments. Still, she pointed to financial barriers in sport: “They don’t lie when they say tennis is a white sport.”

Memese said that while apartheid ended in 1994, gender-based violence now denies women freedom of movement and economic participation. “If you want to go jog at six o’clock and it’s a bit dark, you’d rather not,” she said. The UN has called the violence a crisis and a “national wound.”

Government data shows women are more likely to be unemployed, shoulder unpaid care work, and remain underrepresented in senior leadership. Montjane believes the women of 1956 changed history: “The platform has been set.”

At the museum, bricks from the old jail were reused in the new building. “We are using the bricks of the past to build our future,” Memese said. For Dinat, the lesson endures: “Every generation has its own struggles, and every generation has to decide whether it will stand up for what is right.”