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Gender and Revolutionary Change: Zimbabwean Women’s Engagement for Freedom, Equality and Autonomy
| This paper focuses on women in Zimbabwe to illuminate the struggles and joys of daily living, managing political participation, and negotiating male dominated cultural hegemony. Too often women are marked as the weaker sex, the sexual object, or the workhorse. Zimbabwean women have long ignored the rhetoric of what they are supposed to “be” and “do” and simply move around the road blocks put in front of them by male dominated cultural and political landscapes. Zimbabwean Women have long taken active roles in the civic and political life of pre-colonial, colonial and independent Zimbabwe. Women were active from the inception of the national liberation struggle and were involved at various levels in the guerilla war from 1963-1980. When Zimbabwe's first democratically elected government came to power in 1980, its rhetoric was explicitly feminist and socialist. As the new government and the people worked to redress all forms of inequality women were elected to Parliament at unprecedented rates. As Zimbabwe dipped into recession, despotism and chaos women work to pull the country up and normalize life. Analyzing women's work and roles in the Guerilla Camps, later in the House of Parliament, and their street activism highlights how, and the extent to which, women use spaces of engagement to gain freedom, equality, and autonomy, i.e. power over their own lives.
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