South Africa: Women and power in the new social movements

"My excitement upon arriving at a large weekend workshop of the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) in South Africa and seeing a room filled with community activists, more than half of whom were women, was abated as the workshop progressed and I realized that most of the women were not participating. It was men’s voices that overwhelmingly dominated the comments from the floor. Of the women who did participate, it was primarily women with lighter skin, for whom English is their primary language," writes Dawn Paley, an intern with Alternatives, currently living in Johannesburg, South Africa. "This experience has led me to question how is it that Black women can make up the bulk of the membership of the movements against neo-liberal policies and be so marginalized in the functioning of these organizations?," she writes in this commentary for www.zmag.org