Women’s activism in Senegal cuts across what has been conceptualized as waves of popular protest in Africa. This happens not only because of the particular endurance of women’s movements since the nineties, but also because of how these have achieved their goals. Despite having started in the 1980s, women’s activism has become especially relevant in the country from the 1990s onward. I has never ceased to mobilize women ever since, contributing to important political changes in the last thirty years, in areas linked with gender activism but going well beyond this framework. Some examples are the legal achievements in laws of parity, nationality, violence against women, and lately rape, among others. In this paper I want to characterize the struggle of Senegalese women as a continuous, and by doing so, to question whether the idea of “wave of popular protests” can be applied to women’s social movements or not. To illustrate this continuity I will address the ongoing struggle for sexual and reproductive rights and its specific achievements. I will do this by highlighting some important moments in the last thirty or so years: a generative moment in 1992’s mobilization around the murder of Doki Niass; the 2019’s mobilization around the murder of Binta Camara; the criminalization of rape in 2020. Secondly, I will explore the idea of ambiguity in these political changes, because despite the relative success of women’s political mobilization, the implementation of gender based politics is marked by negative determinants, such as: the inefficiency of institutions; the institutionalization conducing to neutralization; the invisibility of women’s issues in wider social political movements; social constructions of piety and socioreligious identity.

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women rights,activism,global south,feminism