Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues Chapter 1 The Historical Background to Women’s Rights in Contemporary Zimbabwe Colonial Rhodesia was a patriarchal society across the board, for all racial categories, notwithstanding its apparent liberal attitude to gender in the sphere of settler politics. After women had obtained the vote in 19192 in Southern Rhodesia, Ethel Tawse Jolly was elected the first woman parliamentarian ‘in the British overseas empire’ (Lowry 1997:259). During the second world war, Harare (then Salisbury) elected its first woman mayor. But married settler women in this country suffered various disabilities in law and practice, many of which arose from the assumption of ‘marital power’ in Roman-Dutch law. For example, in 1974, a white married woman had to sign special indemnification to her bank, stating that as a married woman she had understood the contract, in order to stand guarantor for someone else’s overdraft. Since no other category of guarantor had to sign such an undertaking, the assumption seemed to be that marriage caused a woman to lose her capacity to understand contracts. A few years later, a female university lecturer in a permanent, tenured post with the advantage of an additional employer’s guarantee was refused a mortgage bond by the country’s largest building society. ‘We do not give mortgages to married women’, she was told, ostensibly because married women fall pregnant and abandon their jobs. However, on being offered a certificate of spaying, the man who told her this only blushed. Perhaps he was at too low a level in the hierarchy to rethink the nature of his institution’s gender discrimination. Black women suffered even greater disabilities, being subordinated by ‘African customary law’ as well as ‘general law’. They were generally regarded, by the colonial settler state, as perpetual minors at law. Women in the Liberation Struggle Having recurrently been discriminated against by differently-qualified franchises and racially-separated voting rolls, black Zimbabweans went to war to wrest their political rights from the discriminatory settler state. Young women were among those who joined the struggle intending to fight. Very few achieved this objective.3 Most were sidelined into refugee camps. Some acted as couriers and porters. Many were abused. All have been the subject of intense curiosity and academic investigation, in numerous doctoral theses and published articles. (A representative selection of these publications appears in the References, which are by no means comprehensive.) As in most ‘revolutions’, the issue of gender equality was regarded as less pressing than other inequalities, by those men who fought for liberation and settled at Lancaster House in 1979. In particular, no provision was made to regularise the social position of the children born to young women who had participated in the struggle. Paternity was often known but not publicly acknowledged. On return to Zimbabwe, they were often raised by their mothers’ families. The children themselves often lacked birth certificates and, as a result, later experienced great difficulty in obtaining identity cards. Their civil rights have been impaired by their problematic conception and childhood. Their mothers experienced even greater social difficulties. ‘Female ex-combatants’ were widely perceived as rough and ready to fight at the slightest provocation, as ‘culturally’ unmanageable and unmarriageable, by their own families as well as potential spouses. As a small minority, they were subject to considerable social pressure after Independence to abandon their liberationist role and credentials, and to re-create their identities as demure, outwardly-submissive, respectably-married women. Some, like Margaret Dongo, resisted these pressures and played prominent roles in the more recent struggle for gender equality. Others negotiated a middle path within their political parties, assuming political 2 In the same year as women were enfranchised in the UK. 3 See Pathisa Nyathi ‘Women and the liberation struggle’, The Zimbabwe Mirror 18 June 1999; Zimbabwe Women Writers Women of Resilience; Lyons (1999); Nhongo-Simbanegavi (2000). 4