This year's Women's Month is a markedly different one. This year, there will be no frilly celebrations and gatherings.
Most of us will be at home, engaging via various media platforms.
I think this is a good opportunity for us to think deeply of the status of women in this country and move away from hovering over superficial issues in relation to women's status.
What would Lillian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, Charlotte Maxeke, Helen Joseph and the thousands of women who marched in 1956 say about the status of women in our country today? Especially with the rampant violence on women. I think it is safe to say that they are turning in their graves.
Parts of the petition against pass laws created by the Federation of South African Women read: "We, the women of South Africa, have come here today. We African women know too well the effect this law upon our homes, our children. We, who are not African women know how our sisters suffer.
"That women and young girls will be exposed to humiliation and degradation at the hands of pass-searching policemen.
"That women will lose their right to move freely from one place to another.
"We, voters and voteless, call upon your government not to issue passes to African women. We shall not resist until we have won for our children their fundamental rights of freedom, justice and security."
It is shameful that, although not about passes, the above statements found in the petition still ring true - even in the democratic dispensation. The petition speaks to the humiliation and degradation of women and girls at the hands of law enforcement today.
Women and girls speak of their degrading and humiliating experiences when approaching law enforcement. Their experience at police stations is characterised by badgering, lack of empathy, victim blaming, slut shaming and poking holes into their version of events. Their experiences of abuse often re-traumatise them.
The 1956 petition speaks to women losing their right to move freely from one place to another. For a South African woman today, this persists. It is not passes that govern or limit the movement of SA women. It is the constant fear for their life, the constant possibility of violence being meted against them in the home and as soon as they step into the streets.
The problem is widespread. Daily Monitor of Uganda reported that "at least 2, 300 schoolgirls have conceived during the coronavirus lockdown".
Firstly, what the publication titled as "conceiving" is actually rape as minors are affected.
This pandemic has not only left women vulnerable in terms of material conditions, but women and girl children are having to spend more time in their homes around those who perpetrate abuses against them. The statistics in our own country display an increase in sexual violence.
It is not yet uhuru for women, freedom has not dawned. From their homes, to factory floors and to the boardrooms. Inequality, sexual harassment in the workplace, lack of women representation in all spheres of government and the private sector characterises their reality. Women have and continue to call upon action to their various challenges, however, little change is achieved.
Because I am not a woman, I cannot blatantly state that there is nothing to celebrate this Women's Day. However, as an outsider looking in, to me it seems there is very little to celebrate, if at all.
Despite the best efforts of the 1956 march, women today still have to march, mobilise and petition for conditions long due to them.
The systematic shackles placed on women persist; they may not govern their movements in the literal sense but there are countless factors that impact women's freedom negatively today.
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