Women’s rights begin with the right to truth

Every August, South Africa remembers the women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956. We honour their courage, celebrate their resilience and remind ourselves that women’s rights were never handed to us, they were organised for, marched for and demanded.

Their struggle was never simply about passes. It was about dignity. It was about freedom. It was about the right to participate fully in shaping the society in which they lived.

Nearly 70 years later, our understanding of what participation means has changed dramatically. Women vote. Women serve in Parliament. Women lead businesses, movements and governments. Yet beneath these important gains lies a quieter question that receives remarkably little attention.

Can women truly exercise democratic power if the information upon which they make decisions is systematically manipulated?

This question sits at the heart of what I have begun calling Democratic Information Integrity.

Democracy is often imagined as something that happens every five years inside a voting station. We celebrate free and fair elections, count ballots and congratulate ourselves on peaceful transfers of power. But democracy begins long before election day. It begins the moment a citizen starts forming an opinion about the issues that will eventually shape how they vote, participate, organise and hold power to account.

Every democratic choice begins with information.

Information ecosystems

Before a community consents to a mining project, before residents attend a public participation meeting, before parents decide whether to trust a municipality, before citizens support a political party, they first encounter stories. They encounter advertisements. They consume news. They scroll through social media. They receive WhatsApp messages from friends and family. They listen to political speeches and corporate promises.

These information ecosystems quietly shape democratic outcomes long before anyone enters a polling station. That reality should concern all of us. But it should concern feminists in particular. Women continue to occupy the frontline of everyday democracy.

Across South Africa, women remain disproportionately responsible for managing households, raising children, caring for elderly relatives, organising neighbourhoods, leading community organisations and holding together families through economic and social uncertainty. When municipalities fail to deliver water, women adapt. When electricity prices rise, women restructure already stretched household budgets. When climate disasters strike, women absorb much of the unpaid care work that follows. When public services collapse, women become the institutions that keep communities functioning.

Filtering out the truth

Yet these same women are increasingly expected to navigate an information environment saturated with misinformation, disinformation, political spin and sophisticated corporate communications.

We often speak about women’s unpaid care work. Far less attention is given to another invisible burden many women now carry: information care work.

In households across the country, women increasingly become the people responsible for separating fact from fiction. They verify rumours before sharing them with family. They explain election processes to neighbours. They interpret government notices for elderly relatives. They help children distinguish reliable information from manipulation online. They decode complicated environmental reports and legal documents. They protect their families from scams, falsehoods and confusion.

None of this labour appears in employment statistics. None of it is recognised in economic policy. Yet democracy increasingly depends upon it. Women have become custodians of information integrity inside their communities. That responsibility becomes even more visible when we examine climate politics. 

Greenwashing

Over the past couple of years, my work focused on challenging fossil fuel greenwashing in South Africa. At first glance, greenwashing appears to be an environmental communications problem. In reality, it is something much more profound.

Greenwashing is the manufacture of democratic consent.

When fossil fuel companies market gas as “clean energy”, describe new extraction projects as “sustainable development”, or present fossil fuel expansion as an inevitable pathway to prosperity, they are not simply advertising products. They are shaping public understanding. They are influencing how communities perceive risk, how politicians justify policy decisions and how citizens imagine their country’s future.

Communities are then expected to participate in public consultations and environmental decision-making processes armed with information that is incomplete, selective or deliberately misleading.

Women often experience the consequences of those decisions first.

They care for children whose asthma worsens because of pollution. They travel further to collect water during droughts. They lose informal livelihoods when ecosystems are damaged. They shoulder additional domestic labour as environmental conditions deteriorate. Yet they are frequently the last to receive independent, accessible information capable of supporting genuinely informed participation.

Information is democratic infrastructure

Without trustworthy information, consent becomes performative. Without informed consent, democracy itself begins to erode. This insight extends well beyond climate politics. Women’s democratic agency is shaped every day by information about healthcare, education, policing, housing, local government, political parties, corruption, gender-based violence and economic policy. When those information environments are manipulated – whether by corporations, political actors or digital platforms – the democratic choices women make become increasingly constrained. This is why I believe Democratic Information Integrity must become recognised as a feminist issue.

Historically, feminist movements have expanded our understanding of rights. They taught us that violence was not only physical, but structural. That inequality was not only economic, but cultural. That care work was not private, but political.

Perhaps it is now time to recognise that information is not merely communicative – it is democratic infrastructure. The integrity of information determines whether participation is meaningful or merely symbolic.

Holding leaders accountable

This becomes particularly urgent as South Africa approaches another cycle of local government elections. Local government is where democracy feels most immediate. It is where people experience the quality of water, electricity, sanitation, housing and public transport. It is also where women often carry the burden of compensating for institutional failure.

If communities receive distorted information about budgets, infrastructure projects, political funding or corporate influence, their ability to hold local leaders accountable is fundamentally weakened.

Women’s democratic participation cannot be reduced to turnout at polling stations. It must include the conditions that make participation meaningful. Those conditions include access to truthful, transparent and independent information.

As artificial intelligence accelerates, political advertising becomes increasingly personalised and misinformation grows more sophisticated, this conversation becomes even more urgent. We are entering an era where democratic manipulation may become less visible precisely because it becomes more technologically advanced.

Women’s rights cannot afford to arrive late to that conversation.

The constant redefining of freedom

The women who marched in 1956 understood something that remains true today: democracy is never secured once and for all. Every generation must redefine what freedom requires. Perhaps our generation’s contribution is to recognise that democratic freedom depends not only on the right to speak, protest or vote, but also on the integrity of the information that shapes those acts.

Women’s rights begin long before election day. They begin with the ability to understand the choices before us, to question those in power, to challenge manufactured narratives and to participate in public life equipped with information that serves the public rather than powerful interests.

The women of 1956 marched for dignity. In 2026, defending that dignity may require us to recognise one more fundamental democratic right: The right to truth.

Democracy cannot flourish where information is manipulated, and women cannot be fully free where democratic choices are built upon deception. DM