There is much public and political debate about the impact of the ANC Women’s League on gender politics in the country. The question: Is the ANC Women’s League still a powerful force for change or has it lost its way?
This Women’s Month, Prof Shireen Hassim will give the keynote address at the ninth annual Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture to be held at the University of Johannesburg (UJ)’s Council Chambers, Madibeng Building, Auckland Park Kingsway Campus on Monday, 18 August 2014 at 18:00. The title of the lecture is Past, present and future of the ANC Women’s League and Implications for gender equality, which Prof Hassim will use to sketch some of the paradoxes and puzzles surrounding the issue of the emancipation of women.
The media is invited to the lecture.
Prof Hassim is a lecturer from the Politics Department at the University of the Witwatersrand and the author of The ANC Women’s League: A Jacana Pocket History and Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (2006), which won the 2007 American Political Science Association’s Victoria Shuck Award for best book on women and politics. Her research interests are in the area of feminist theory and politics, social movements and collective action, the politics of representation and affirmative action, and social policy. She is co-editor of No Shortcuts to Power: Women and Policymaking in Africa (2003); Gender and Social Policy in a Global Context (2006) and Go Home or Die Here: Xenophobia, Violence and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa.
About the Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture
It is the ninth year that the Faculty of Humanities and the Centre for Social Development in Africa (CSDA) at UJ is honouring Helen Joseph as an iconic figure who has played a major role in the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa via the memorial lecture. On the ninth of August 1956, Helen Joseph was one of the women who led the anti-pass march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, one of the largest demonstrations staged in South Africa.
