Name: For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

Hilda Bernstein

International Defence and Aid Fund

Women in Apartheid South Africa

For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears

Marion

It is unthinkable that racism would be without implications for mental health. Healthy mental functioning and personality development depend on the presence and continuity of such essential experiences as the individual's sense of security and worth, freedom for personal growth and identification with a community of equals. Racism undercuts at the roots of healthy mental life by depriving its victims of these experiences and by conditioning them into accepting the myth that the cause of their inferior status in society lies irrevocably within themselves.

For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears is about women in South Africa and the circumstances of their lives. It explains how the oppression and exploitation of the majority of South African women

-as women, as workers and above all as black people - is an integral part of the apartheid system.

It recounts how, for that reason, the movement of women to free themselves has always been an integral part of the struggle for national liberation.

The first version of the book was published in 1975, at the start of the United Nations International Decade of Women. The present version, appearing at the end of that decade, is substantially rewritten and contains much that is new, reflecting changes brought about during the past ten years in the impact of apartheid on women and of the mobilisation of women in the struggle against apartheid.

As well as covering the laws and institutions of apartheid, Hilda Bernstein shows how the lives of women are affected at every level by the system and how black women form the most oppressed and exploited sector of the population. Family life, personal relations, pay and working conditions, health, control of fertility, rape and abortion are all directly affected by the functioning of the system.

The book focuses also on the apparent contradiction between the extent of the oppression of women in South Africa and their capacity for defiance, their ability to survive, to protect those who depend on them and to fight oppression with ever increasing strength and consistency. In the conclusion, Hilda Bernstein writes: 'Victory in this struggle against apartheid is the absolute condition for any fundamental change in the social status of women - the participation of women is the absolute condition of its success.'

For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears is about women in South Africa and the circumstances of their lives. It explains how the oppression and exploitation of the majority of South African women

-as women, as workers and above all as black people - is an integral part of the apartheid system.

It recounts how, for that reason, the movement of women to free themselves has always been an integral part of the struggle for national liberation.

The first version of the book was published in 1975, at the start of the United Nations International Decade of Women. The present version, appearing at the end of that decade, is substantially rewritten and contains much that is new, reflecting changes brought about during the past ten years in the impact of apartheid on women and of the mobilisation of women in the struggle against apartheid.

As well as covering the laws and institutions of apartheid, Hilda Bernstein shows how the lives of women are affected at every level by the system and how black women form the most oppressed and exploited sector of the population. Family life, personal relations, pay and working conditions, health, control of fertility, rape and abortion are all directly affected by the functioning of the system.

The book focuses also on the apparent contradiction between the extent of the oppression of women in South Africa and their capacity for defiance, their ability to survive, to protect those who depend on them and to fight oppression with ever increasing strength and consistency. In the conclusion, Hilda Bernstein writes: 'Victory in this struggle against apartheid is the absolute condition for any fundamental change in the social status of women - the participation of women is the absolute condition of its success.'

For Their Triumphs and For Their Tears Women in Apartheid South Africa

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