Freedom Is Not an Anniversary: What Women's Month Must Confront

The violence we have normalised

Freedom cannot coexist with fear, and fear is the daily condition of too many women in this country. South Africa's femicide rate remains among the highest recorded anywhere in the world, and the overwhelming majority of women who are killed are killed by someone they knew, trusted, or loved. This is not random violence. It is patterned, predictable, and preventable — which makes our collective failure to prevent it a policy failure, not simply a tragedy.

At Soul City Institute, our prevention work has taught us that gender-based violence is not an aberration within our society; it is produced by it. It is manufactured in the jokes that excuse control as love, in the sermons that counsel submission over safety, in the workplaces that quietly punish women who report, and in the courts that ask survivors to prove their pain beyond reasonable doubt. Ending it requires more than another hotline number recited in a Women's Month speech. It requires engaging men and boys not as an afterthought but as central partners in prevention, and it requires the political will to fund that work at the scale the crisis demands, not the scale that is comfortable.

The bodily autonomy we still ration

Freedom also means the right to make decisions about one's own body without permission, punishment, or postcode determining the outcome. Sexual and reproductive health rights are enshrined in our Constitution and our law, yet access to that care still depends heavily on where a woman lives, how much she earns, and whether the clinic worker in front of her has chosen to serve rather than judge. A right that exists only on paper is not a right; it is a promise deferred, and deferred rights are simply another form of unfreedom.

Young women bear the sharpest edge of this gap. Comprehensive sexuality education remains patchy and politically contested, contraception access is inconsistent between urban and rural areas, and stigma continues to police what should be private medical decisions. If we are serious about women's freedom, sexual and reproductive health cannot remain the polite, unspoken chapter of the gender conversation. It must be central to it.

The leadership we welcome in theory and resist in practice

There is a particular exhaustion in being celebrated as a leader in principle while being undermined as one in practice. Women lead households, movements, congregations, and companies across this country, yet still encounter boardrooms where their competence must be proven twice, church councils where their calling is questioned, and political parties that use them for votes in an election year and sideline them the moment the ballots are counted.

Economic dependency compounds all of this. A woman who cannot leave an unsafe relationship because she cannot afford to is not free, no matter what the law says she is entitled to. Real freedom requires economic architecture — access to assets, credit, land, and leadership pathways — not only legal architecture. Feminist movement building, at its core, is the slow, unglamorous work of constructing that scaffolding so that a woman's safety is never contingent on her salary.

What this Women's Month must be, instead

South Africa has some of the most progressive gender legislation in the world. We do not have a shortage of laws. We have a shortage of enforcement, of funding, of political courage, and of the everyday cultural shifts that make legislation meaningful in a woman's actual life. Freedom is not the absence of a prohibition; it is the presence of safety, choice, and dignity in the ordinary moments of a day — walking home after dark, saying no without fear of retaliation, planning or ending a pregnancy without shame, leading without being punished for it, and speaking without being silenced.

This Women's Month, Soul City Institute is not interested in commemoration for its own sake. Our work continues to focus on what actually shifts outcomes: prevention programming that engages men and boys as partners rather than obstacles, sexual and reproductive health advocacy that treats bodily autonomy as non-negotiable, and investment in the young women and feminist movements who will carry this work forward long after this year's campaigns have ended.

Freedom for women in this country will not be granted from a podium in August. It is being built, slowly and deliberately, by those willing to do the work in the other eleven months of the year. That is the work we choose. It is the work this country owes every woman still waiting for her turn to be free.