NATIONAL LIBERATION AND THE POLITICAL LIFE OF EXILE, sex, gender, and nation in the struggle against apartheid

296pp., maps, paperback, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2025

ISBN: 9780821426661

Rachel Sandwell discusses how women, particularly within the African National Congress during its years in exile from 1960 to 1990, shaped South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. She highlights women’s diplomatic work; their advocacy for policies on sexual education, birth control, family life, and childcare; the role they played in connecting exiles to left-wing international organisations, and their struggle for recognition beyond the role of “mothers of the nation”.

"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

"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

Rachel Sandwell is 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.