During the
negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa, the WNC's Women's Charter campaign mobilised two million women to influence the drafting of South Africa's Constitution. The WNC's built its national campaign around five primary themes: women's legal status; women's access to land, resources and water; violence against women; health; and work. Some scholars describe the WNC as the closest South Africa has come to having a strong women's movement. However, they note that the WNC was not backed up by a strong, locally rooted, mass movement of women. Its affiliates tended to be women's organizations with long histories, but with weak organizational capacities and resources. The coalition did not use a mass mobilization strategy to back up its demands, rather, it relied on access to political parties as its main lever of influence. At the same time, the demands of the constitutional negotiations required the coalition to utilize the technical expertise of feminist academics and lawyers in ways that previous women's movements had not managed. Some scholars note that the WNC and the gendered outcomes of the South African transition was a process influenced by the South African trade union movement. The period since 1994 witnessed the weakening and virtual collapse of the WNC. ==See also==