A01=Catherine Higgs
anti-apartheid
apartheid era
Author_Catherine Higgs
Category=JBFA1
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHH
Category=QRMB1
Catholic Church
education
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
healthcare
history
nuns
oral history
racial integration
South Africa
women
womens' activism
Product details
- ISBN 9780299352301
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Sisters for Justice explores the activism of a select number of Catholic religious sisters in South Africa, beginning in the 1960s. Catherine Higgs analyzes how these individuals’ seemingly small actions in a variety of spheres helped shift policy and contribute to the dismantling of the apartheid state. As she reveals, they helped provide basic medical services to displaced Africans, opened private convent schools to children of all races despite segregationist laws, advocated for African pension rights, served on justice and peace commissions, and joined protests—all while working within the context of a hierarchical male-led church initially hesitant to criticize a state openly hostile to Catholics.
Based on extensive oral history interviews with white and Black sisters as well as deep archival research, this groundbreaking book reveals a largely untold story, nested within the broader literature of women’s activism in South Africa. The result is a new perspective that expands and intensifies our understanding of a dramatic period during which individual actions, in the aggregate, contributed to social change.
Based on extensive oral history interviews with white and Black sisters as well as deep archival research, this groundbreaking book reveals a largely untold story, nested within the broader literature of women’s activism in South Africa. The result is a new perspective that expands and intensifies our understanding of a dramatic period during which individual actions, in the aggregate, contributed to social change.
Catherine Higgs is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959 and Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa and the coeditor of Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas.
