Self-Help Programs as Educative Activities of Black Women in the South, 1895-1925: Focus on Four Key Areas

1982 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Neverdon-Morton
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Motlhatlego Dennis Matotoka ◽  
Kolawole Olusola Odeku

Black African women in South Africa are poorly represented at managerial levels in the South African private sector since the advent of democracy. Their exclusion at these occupational levels persists despite the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998 (EEA) requiring that the private sector must ensure that all occupational levels are equitably represented and reflects the demographics of South Africa. The South African private sector demonstrates its lack of commitment to proliferating black African women into managerial positions by deliberately engaging in race-based recruitment and failing to develop and promote suitably qualified women into managerial positions. As such, the private sector is failing to create upward mobility for black African women to break the glass ceiling. The EEA requires the private sector to apply affirmative action measures in order to achieve equity in the workplace. It is submitted that since 1998, the private sector has been provided with an opportunity to set it own targets in order to achieve equity. However, 22 years later, black African women are still excluded in key managerial positions. However, the EEA does not specifically impose penalties if the private sector fails to achieve the set targets.This approach has failed to increase the representation of black women in managerial positions. However, the EEA does not specifically impose penalties if the private sector fails to achieve the set targets. Whilst this approach seeks to afford the private sector importunity to set its own target, this approach has failed to increase the representation of black women in managerial positions. Employing black African women in managerial levels enhances their skills and increases their prospects to promotions and assuming further leadership roles in the private sector. This paper seeks to show that the progression of black African women requires South Africa to adopt a quota system without flexibility that will result in the private sector being compelled to appoint suitably qualified black African women in managerial levels.


Africa ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista Johnson

This article examines funding for HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and the relationship between foreign donors and the South African government. The recognition of the AIDS pandemic as an epochal crisis has led to a proliferation of international and donor organizations now directly involved in the governance, tracking and management of the pandemic in many African countries. In many ways, the heavy donor hand that is increasingly defining the pandemic and the global response to it feeds into a new imperialist logic that subordinates pan-African agendas, masks broader issues of access central to the fight against the pandemic, and strengthens traditional relationships of dependence between wealthy Western nations and poorer African nations. The South African government's relationship with foreign donors, however, has been shaped by its efforts to develop an African response to the pandemic not determined nor primarily funded by foreign aid. This article highlights the positive and negative implications of the sometimes contentious relationship between the South African government and foreign donors, as well as the Africa-centred, self-help agenda it pursues, highlighting the opportunities as well as challenges for African governments to define the global response to the pandemic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liette Gidlow

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.


Author(s):  
Sunny Sinha

Helen Suzman (1917–2009) was internationally renowned for many years as the sole white woman representative in the South African Parliament to speak out against apartheid measures. As a Member of the Parliament (1953–1989), she spoke out against the unfair and discriminatory policies of the government, for instance, opposing capital punishment, prison conditions, gender discrimination against Black women, and policy of apartheid.


Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman

Chapter 1 presents the early life experiences of Sarah Breedlove and their influences in shaping Madam C. J. Walker’s identity, sense of responsibility to others, and philanthropic giving. Her philanthropy began to form when she was a poor, widowed migrant moving around the South dependent upon a robust philanthropic network of black civil society institutions and black women who cared for her during the most difficult period of her life. The chapter shows how she was socialized into respectability, racial uplift ideology, generosity, and philanthropic giving by a group of St. Louis black churchwomen and clubwomen, whose support and mentoring enabled her to change her life course. In outlining her early membership and involvement with key networks of women, including washerwomen, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Mite Missionary Society, and the Court of Calanthe fraternal order, the chapter demonstrates the formation of Madam Walker’s moral imagination as the foundation for her philanthropic life. It situates Walker within the culture of the AME Church, which immersed her in faith, black history, self-help and racial uplift ideologies, education, activism, and internationalism. In the process, the chapter reveals Walker’s formation of a moral imagination that integrated business and philanthropy, embraced particular causes, and forged diverse means of giving.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
Jessica Brannon-Wranosky ◽  
Cecilia Gutierrez Venable
Keyword(s):  

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