Social reproduction in single-black-woman-headed families in post-apartheid South Africa : a case study of Bophelong Township in Gauteng.
Date
2012-02-08
Authors
Van Driel, Maria
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Abstract
This study investigates the nature of social reproduction in single-black-womanheaded
families in post-apartheid South Africa, through an ethnographic case study in
Bophelong Township in Gauteng. The study focuses on the two coterminous aspects
of social reproduction: the physical reproduction of labour power and the
reproduction of social relations of the mode of production as such, in this case
capitalism. The study included a socio-economic survey, participatory observation
and in-depth interviews with woman-heads over a period of four years. After a
preliminary analysis, the data concerning the woman-headed family form was
organised into three generations, the Grandmothers, the Mothers and the Daughters.
The conclusions are however tentative given that this was a qualitative study based on
a particular type of woman-headed family, one sample in one township in South
Africa. The internal variations within this family form expressed the woman-heads’
concrete lived experience, biography and social agency; and are moments of a single
totality. While black women’s location is informed by many social determinations
that intersect and deepen their oppression as woman-heads, they are cast into
leadership roles and directly mediate relations within their families, with males, with
family kin, with communities and society. The woman-heads find themselves in
contradictory positions within patriarchal society, given their own socialization, the
daily struggle to reproduce children physically and the need to transcend traditional
patriarchal social relations, including the challenge to appropriate egalitarian forms of
leadership and avoid becoming proxies for patriarchy. Despite daily struggles for
survival, woman-headed families are important social spaces for struggles for
egalitarian family arrangements, including those concerning sons and traditional
culture, historically the domain of men. However, it is necessary that the struggles
within the family are anchored and supported by the struggles for egalitarianism
within society as a whole. In particular this means struggles anchored and supported
by a radical, grassroots and dynamic women’s movement.
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Keywords
Black-woman-head, Social reproduction, Family-household