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Frances Goitsemang Baard OMSS OLG (1 October 1909 – 1997) was a South African (ethnic Tswana) trade unionist, organiser for the African National Congress Women's League and a Patron of the United Democratic Front, who was commemorated in the renaming of the Diamantveld District Municipality (Kimberley) as the Frances Baard District Municipality. Schoeman Street in Pretoria was also renamed in her honour. This heroine is the reason we celebrate National Women's Day today in South Africa.

Early life and education Baard (also referred to as Frances Maswabi (or Masuabi)) was born Frances Maswabi (or Masuabi), in Green Point, Beaconsfield, Kimberley, on 1 October 1909 (other sources suggest 1901). Her father was Herman Maswabi from Ramotswa in Botswana, who had gone to Kimberley to work on the mines, while her mother, Sarah Voss, was a Tswana person from Kimberley. She married Lucas Baard in Port Elizabeth in 1942, having known him from school days in Kimberley.

She attended the Racecourse Primary School and the Lyndhurst Road School in Malay Camp, Kimberley, before enrolling for a short time at Kimberley's famous Perseverance School (cut short owing to the death of her father). She worked briefly as a teacher and then, moving to Port Elizabeth, as a domestic servant and a factory worker.

Imprisonment She was arrested in 1960 and then again in 1963 when she was kept in solitary confinement for 12 months.

In commemoration of this daughter of Kimberley and the Northern Cape, and of her role in the Women's March on 9 August 1956, a bronze statue of her was unveiled in Kimberley by the Premier of the Northern Cape, Mrs Hazel Jenkins, on 9 August 2009. The inscription on the granite plinth cites the famous remark from her autobiography:

"My spirit is not banned – I still say I want freedom in my lifetime."