Thousands of people attended protest meetings in urban areas all over the country and the mood was often militant. In March 1956 a pamphlet of the Transvaal branch of FEDSAW proclaimed: ‘Women do NOT want Pass Laws! We are not prepared to submit to the humiliations and suffering that Pass Laws bring.’ When several women burned their passbooks in the small Free State town of Winburg on 8 April, the authorities retaliated by refusing to pay pensions to women unless they had passbooks. Helpless against such actions, the women were forced to submit. In rural areas, female farmworkers were transported to town by their employers to register for passes, often not realising the implications or unable to resist. By 22 March 1956, passbooks had already been distributed to 1 429 women.
The most significant protest took place in Pretoria on 9 August 1956, when 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings. Many were carrying their young white charges on their backs, and one newspaper captioned a photograph: ‘Do their parents know where they are?’ Despite the government’s refusal to grant the leaders an audience, the women remained disciplined and dignified throughout. Once again, Die Vaderland could only imagine that it must have been white women who organised the gathering. A large pile of signed protest letters was left in front of Prime Minister JG Strijdom’s office. The women sang ‘Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, you have struck a rock’, words that still echo in the country’s collective memory.36
Notwithstanding this protest and further demonstrations by more than 50 000 women in 30 towns during the first half of 1956, some 23 000 passbooks had already been distributed in 37 towns by September 1956. Though more protest meetings were held, right until 1958, the distribution of passbooks continued.
By now the government considered the ANC to be its greatest enemy, and the movement was banned in many areas. For more than four months, all meetings of black people were prohibited, severely hindering the commemoration of the Women’s Day march in August 1958. Helen Joseph, a stalwart of the 1956 protest who was also secretary of FEDSAW, helped coordinate activities in the face of the relentless implementation of the pass law. Without a passbook, women were hampered in many ways. Black nurses, who were already up in arms because they were segregated from their white colleagues in terms of the Nursing Act of 1957, could, for example, not register for midwife courses unless they had identity numbers which came along with passbooks. In spite of many protest meetings elsewhere, women in larger cities such as Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban hardly raised their voices. When, in October 1958, the passbook unit moved to Johannesburg, Drum magazine wrote: ‘Now everyone is asking: when will the passes come to Johannesburg and how will the women in that big city react to them?’37 Women were encouraged by FEDSAW as well as the ANC Women’s League to resist, and a few small protest meetings were held, but the same strategy that had forced nurses – as well as pensioners – to succumb was used in Johannesburg: various services and amenities depended on having an identity number.
When the passbook unit first moved into Johannesburg, women who were politically isolated and economically vulnerable were targeted, namely the large but fragmented body of domestic workers. By mid-October 1958, all white households had received a circular from the Native Commissioner with instructions to take their ‘native female servant’ to its offices ‘in order that she may be registered for the Native Population Register and issued with a reference book’. The letter was worded in such a way that it sounded like a routine undertaking, and omitted to state that at that stage it was not unlawful to be without a pass. Most employers dutifully complied, and black women who realised that the pass laws entailed complete control over their mobility were powerless to resist. FEDSAW described the women’s vulnerability as follows:
Living in the servants’ quarters in the backyards, African women from the country, the farms, the small reserves, women far from their homes, were forbidden by trespass regulations to have their husbands or even their tiny children with them, to lead a family life, isolated and unaware, dependent upon the ‘madam’ for the roof over their heads.38
Initially it seemed that the passbook distribution would take place without any trouble. However, on 21 October 1958 – a Tuesday – the ANC Women’s League struck back, in particular the Sophiatown branch which was virtually on its knees because of the Group Areas Act of 1950. This retaliatory move initiated a huge civil disobedience campaign. Sophiatown women marched to the Native Commissioner’s office in an attempt to prevent domestic workers registering for passbooks. The police arrested 249 women, and the news spread across the city like wildfire. Women rushed to the scene in droves, and by nightfall 584 women had been arrested, with 934 being jailed by the end of the week. The following Monday, another 900 women were added to the already overfull police cells in the city. According to newspaper reports, the women were ‘defiant but high-spirited’. Much publicity was given to their activities, with photographs of women giving the thumbs-up sign. Johannesburg’s biggest afternoon daily, The Star, carried the headline: ‘No Nannies Today’, and FEDSAW sent a circular urging employers not to allow their workers to register for passes. Walker explains: ‘If they did, [the circular] argued their children would suffer when their “nannies” were arrested for not having the correct documents.’39 For that reason, it was better to have no documents at all.
While this was all rather inconvenient for white households, it was black households who bore the brunt, with wives and mothers being in jail. Male ANC leaders insisted that the Women’s League should be more careful and not join the demonstrations. The mass support of ‘ordinary’ women that the Black Sash and FEDSAW had bargained for did not materialise, and though meetings were held on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall, the momentum of the anti-pass law demonstrations could not be sustained. The actions of FEDSAW and the Sophiatown women had merely succeeded in delaying the introduction of passbooks.
At the end of 1958 the government announced that 1 300 000 passbooks had already been issued to about half of all adult black women in the country. The Native Labour laws of 1959 explicitly determined that all black women in paid employment should be registered in the same way as men, thereby making it a criminal offence for both employer and employee if the black woman worker did not have a passbook. This law led to a major shift in official policy regarding black women in towns and city areas. To safeguard themselves against arrest, women without passbooks had to obtain written permission to be in a specific area.40
Protesting was not yet over, however. The following year, many women supported the ‘potato boycott’ which was aimed at exposing the exploitation of farmworkers in the eastern Transvaal. In Natal, about 20 000 women rose up against poor working conditions, ‘striking fear and alarm in the white farming communities in Natal’.41 Rural women in particular realised that the passbook system might make it impossible for them to escape their oppressive circumstances. As Walker explains:
[W]omen in the reserves were in fact caught in the pincers of a policy whose aims and results were in themselves contradictory. By trying to maintain the traditional, tribal political and economic structures but manipulate them to their own ends, the government was undermining them. Women’s position in the resulting system was ambiguous, their status and self-image ambivalent – subordinate, junior, yet burdened with responsibilities and a de facto authority not sanctioned by society.42
Many black women already in cities managed to remain there, mainly because of the need for domestic workers who were by now very much part of white South Africa’s lifestyle. Twenty years after the pass protests, 60% of white households had domestic workers – mainly black women. A 1980 study by PA Erasmus revealed the extent to which white households employed domestic workers. The sample number of 2 356 employers lived in ‘white areas’ that included towns, cities and farms. According to Erasmus, 31% had a full-time black domestic worker in their employment while 28% had a part-time worker. About 25% of these women stayed on the premises. Only 10.4% of the households employed a black man full-time, and these were mostly gardeners. In only one out of ten households did a black man sleep on the premises. Although the study focused on whites, Erasmus found that many urban coloured and Indian families also employed black domestic