Overview

Sisters for Justice explores the activism of a select number of Catholic religious sisters in South Africa, beginning in the 1960s. Catherine Higgs analyzes how these individuals’ seemingly small actions in a variety of spheres helped shift policy and contribute to the dismantling of the apartheid state. As she reveals, they helped provide basic medical services to displaced Africans, opened private convent schools to children of all races despite segregationist laws, advocated for African pension rights, served on justice and peace commissions, and joined protests—all while working within the context of a hierarchical male-led church initially hesitant to criticize a state openly hostile to Catholics. Based on extensive oral history interviews with white and Black sisters as well as deep archival research, this groundbreaking book reveals a largely untold story, nested within the broader literature of women’s activism in South Africa. The result is a new perspective that expands and intensifies our understanding of a dramatic period during which individual actions, in the aggregate, contributed to social change.

Full Product Details

9780299352301

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Higgs brings to the fore the heretofore underrepresented story of the role that Catholic sisters played in South Africa's struggle for liberation. This work is a major contribution, appropriate to audiences studying women's history, not just African or South African history, and issues of resistance, religion, and activism.""--Dawne Y. Curry, author of Social Justice at Apartheid's Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation ""This is a pathbreaking account of how Catholic sisters' essential work in education and health care under apartheid politicized them, leading women to set the pace for growing Catholic opposition to apartheid.""--Meghan Healy-Clancy, author of A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education

“This is a pathbreaking account of how Catholic sisters’ essential work in education and health care under apartheid politicized them, leading women to set the pace for growing Catholic opposition to apartheid.” - Meghan Healy-Clancy, author of A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education “Higgs brings to the fore the heretofore underrepresented story of the role that Catholic sisters played in South Africa’s struggle for liberation. This work is a major contribution, appropriate to audiences studying women's history, not just African or South African history, and issues of resistance, religion, and activism.” - Dawne Y. Curry, author of Social Justice at Apartheid's Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation

Author Information

Catherine Higgs is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959 and Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa and the coeditor of Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas.

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