Digging up the historic role of women at Rhodes University could lead to a transformation in how gender issues are handled, the Women's Academic Solidarity Association (WASA) were told during a seminar to celebrate Women’s Day Saturday 9 August.
Digging up the historic role of women at Rhodes University could lead to a transformation in how gender issues are handled, the Women's Academic Solidarity Association (WASA) were told during a seminar to celebrate Women’s Day Saturday 9 August.
The seminar took place at a half-filled venue situated at the Environmental Learning Centre, on the Rhodes University campus. WASA's Babalwa Magoqwana said the aim of the seminar was to “excavate” women’s history at Rhodes and to discover the spaces in which women's issues took place.
“By taking a look at the challenges that faced women in the past, we are going to be able to shape the transformation space by paying close attention to issues of gender and race," she said.
Key note speaker, Prof Paul Maylam of the History Department, reflected on the history of Rhodes and how gender and race issues were handled in the past.
“Even though the institution has had a conservative culture for a long time, it has been able to draw some of its strengths from its conservatism,” he said. Maylam said this conservative culture kept the university from paying attention to issues affecting women. He noted that steps have been taken to try to bridge this gap in recent years, however.
Prof Thenjiwe Meyiwa, research director of the Human Science Research Council (HSRC), told Grocott’s Mail there is much to be done to address women's issues. “The way in which women's issues are handled in many institutions is horrible, things are still swept under the carpet and only visible on paper,” she said. She concluded that the way to deal with these issues was to listen to women's voices and face the truth.
Prof Louise Vincent from the Politics and International Relations Department said, “Women’s voices are not often taken serious, they are not viewed as voices of authority.” She added that it is time to change the perception that women's voiced need to be loud to be heard.
“The space we live in expects women to use a voice of aggressiveness in order to be taken serious, even though they do not want to be aggressive,” she said.
Magoqwana told Grocott's Mail the seminar's goal was to empower women to set up a “new imagination, one of un-gendered and de-racialised institutions”.
