Overview

Full Product Details

9780821426661

Table of Contents

Reviews

""In this major contribution to African histories of war and feminist critiques of militarism, Rachel Sandwell explores what being political meant for ANC women in Tanzanian exile camps. Through a compelling study of revolutionary childcare centers, she reveals how struggles over sex, motherhood, and care shaped evolving visions of liberation, freedom, and the postapartheid state."" - Alicia C. Decker, author of In Idi Amin's Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda ""Rachel Sandwell's powerful contribution shows that ANC’s women’s activism in the 1950s provided the material and intellectual infrastructure that allowed women leaders to adapt and represent antiapartheid activism as part of a global struggle against colonialism and imperialism in the three decades of exile. By centering women’s roles in leftist-feminist organisations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, figures such as Ruth Mompati and Florence Mophosho emerge as astute strategists, whose ideas of sex and gender are tested and reformulated by younger women activists in the 1970s and 80s. These complex generational contestations about sex, gender and nation are foundational to the post-apartheid gender architecture."" - Siphokazi Magadla, author of Guerrillas and Combative Mothers: Women and the Armed Struggle in South Africa ""Here, at last, is a feminist history of the ANC, which is also a history of ANC feminists and other women who would reject that naming. Rachel Sandwell’s stunning work covers events ranging from women’s mobilization during the 1950s to exiles’ attempts to build and sustain “revolutionary childcare” two decades later. Sandwell demonstrates how the ANC opened a space for bureaucratic construction, radical aspiration, and intense debate-especially around questions of gender, generation, and behavior. Following National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile, students of the ANC will redefine their understanding of the organization and its goals. Whether attempting to control how women acted, or seeking companionship, belonging, or just a bit of fun, Sandwell’s subjects are people who sought freedom, in ways that history has only begun to understand."" - Daniel Magaziner, author of Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa ""With this book, Rachel Sandwell makes an outstanding contribution to the debates on the relationship between revolutionary ideals and quotidian political practices. In thinking of politics as everyday life rather than ideology, she shows that exile allowed a unique space of political possibility in which love, pleasure, pain, and family were part of revolutionary struggle. These everyday relations between activists in the ANC shape and are shaped by the context of exile, in which political solidarity was inextricable from social life. She shows, too, that these intimate and affective concerns were articulated by African women in conversation with feminists in other movements and other spaces. These transnational solidarities defined new and exciting forms of feminist praxis. This exemplary work of history deserves to be read by every scholar of politics and especially by scholars concerned about the relationship between ideas and everyday life."" - Shireen Hassim, author of The ANC Women's League: Sex, Gender, and Politics

Author Information

Rachel Sandwell is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University. Her work has been published in the South African Historical Journal, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Women's History, and the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available