The Women of 1956 crawled so that the next generation can strut

It is important to remember why South Africans celebrate Women’s Day.

On 9 August 1956, over 20 000 women marched to the union building to show resistance to the new pass laws that the apartheid government wanted to implement, these pass laws would have stripped them of their freedom of movement.

The women were led by Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi, “Ma” Albertina Sisulu, Helen Joseph, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.

Every year on Women’s Rights Day, these women are remembered.

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The women of 1956 are, and always will be, a representation of women’s strength and their power to rise against all odds.

The only mistake that was made is using these women and their representation of strength as a way to make women stay in already dead marriages, making women take slaps and beatings in their marriages because women are rocks and “you strike a woman you strike a rock”.

The biggest mistake that was made was using these women and making it seems as if a woman has the innate ability to tolerate even the things that are slowly killing them.

This Women Rights Day, it is important to remember what the women of 1956 fought for, to avoid having women who die trying to hold the knife by the sharp blade, to avoid having a woman who feels like they are not woman enough because they could not stay and persevere when things got hard. To avoid having people view women as rocks and not human beings who get hurt.

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As we remember these women it is important to remember that they did not fight so that women can leave their homes in coffins as a sign of their “strength”.

The woman of 1956 crawled so that the next generation of women can walk, they showed the world that women can be involved in politics which were a men’s thing so that the next generation of women can enter spaces where they were not allowed to enter.

Do not use their names to accept the bare minimum and tolerate abuse, they rose against the oppressive government so that the future generation can rise against any situation that oppresses them.