Making Motherhood Work: Women?s Child Support Claims, Race, and the Remaking of Citizenship in South Africa, 1958-2015

Abstract

This dissertation, tracks the interrelationship between citizenship, kinship, and economy through the lens of claims made by poor South African women for resources to support their children. It is based on 18 months of fieldwork in South Africa that included extended ethnography in the inner-city Point neighborhood of Durban, interviews in isiZulu and English, oral histories, and archival research with court and welfare case files of neighborhood residents. The dissertation demonstrates how the content of citizenship is created and negotiated at the micro-political scale of interpersonal relationship through the everyday processes by which people seek to fashion a secure existence. By detailing women’s labors to garner resources for their families and themselves, this dissertation argues that poor women are shaping the character of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa and forging new relations between citizens and the state. The critical backdrop to this research is the dramatic transformation of South Africa’s political economy between 1960 and 2015. Alongside a transition that extended democratic citizenship for all, new forms of insecurity and exclusion framed by race, class, and gender, have emerged. The collapse of the waged labor system has made formalizing marriages all but impossible and family life increasingly tenuous, the burdens of which are predominantly shouldered by women who continue to be the primary caregivers of children. This dissertation takes a historical anthropological approach to analyzing the meaning of these political economic shifts by chronicling poor mothers’ livelihood strategies across this period. A key aspect of these strategies is social protection and the political recognition it conveyed. The apartheid-era State Maintenance Grant that once robustly supported a minority of white mothers has been replaced by a radical Child Support Grant (CSG) that now reaches 60% of all South Africa’s children at a total cost of 3.5% of the national budget. However, the CSG targets children, not their caregivers, requiring mothers to look elsewhere for support and recognition. Crucially, women are building resource networks across families, friends, and communities that enable alternative conditions of debt and dependence in ways increasingly independent of marriage. Via this “kinshipping” labor, or the fostering of relations of dependence, this dissertation argues, women are redefining obligations between men and women, persons and communities, citizens and state. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on kinship and citizenship. It shows how projects of social reproduction constitute contingent economic and political relationships that structure people’s lives far more than any totalizing logic. By providing a robust account for how unequal capital accumulation and political power are brought about through the production and maintenance of kinship, this analysis contributes to longstanding discussions within both feminist and kinship theory about the inseparability of the domestic, economic, and political domains. Further, this research challenges geopolitical paradigms that separate the global north from south. South Africa’s state social assistance programs generate issues mirrored in Canada, the US, and Europe, while at the same time unemployment and the postcolonial legacy link it to challenges faced across the African continent and beyond.