Women Hold Up Half The Sky - educators' guide

This guide for educators is based on the SAHA portable exhibition kit entitled Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Commemorating Women in the Struggle, in which artefacts from SAHA's archives provide a lens into decades of women's resistance to apartheid.

This guide is intended to help educators to use the exhibition as a starting point to explore with their learners:

• The role of women in the struggle against apartheid
• Threats to the rights of women and girl children today

When interacting with this exhibition, we consider two different notions of ‘struggle'.

• The struggle: This is a term that refers to the political activism where people challenged and resisted against the system of apartheid. In this sense, the exhibition examines the important and often critical role played by women in the struggle against apartheid. They were activists in the political arena and challenged the apartheid state and its laws in a variety of ways. With the achievement of democracy, this women's struggle became part of history.

• Women's struggles: as mothers, grandmothers, daughters and wives, women have struggled to survive against harsh economic conditions; against gender discrimination; and against domestic violence. These are on-going struggles that women today continue to confront.

Download Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Exhibitions in the Classroom booklet (5mb)

ACCESSING THE EXHIBITION ONLINE

There is also an online version of the Women Hold Up Half the Sky exhibition kit that includes downloadable copies of many of the primary sources – posters, photographs, pamphlets, reports, speeches - that appear in the exhibition panels.