Elena Moore

• Associate Professor of Sociology
• University of Cape Town

Policy Brief: Long term care for older persons in South Africa takes place in families. There is an intrinsic value and many social rewards that go with care work but there are also costs to the caregiver and family, especially to women’s well-being in carrying the responsibility. South Africa has approximately 5.4 million people over the age of 60...

The article highlights the heterogeneity of employed women’s experience of family care for older persons by focusing on multigenerational households. First, I argue that care for older persons must be understood in the context of multiple family responsibilities. Second, I show that care for older persons occurs in a context of inequalities that re...

Fieldwork training pack for The Family Caregiving research study which adopts a qualitative longitudinal explorative approach to understanding family care in the Southern African region. Our study explores caregivers and care receivers experience of family care of older persons in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Malawi. More specifically we e...

This chapter explores how customary practices shape the process of becoming a father among amaXhosa men in South Africa. In the context of low marriage rates in South Africa, we focus on the customs for acquiring patrilineal affiliation outside of marriage. Based on in-depth interviews with amaXhosa unmarried fathers, the chapter outlines how fathe...

The COVID-19 global crisis and the “stay-home” response taken by most governments has starkly exposed the dependence of formal economies on the invisible and unpaid care labor of women – a dependence that has intensified during the pandemic as public childcare provision and schools are shut and parents work from home. This article focuses specifica...

Research on post-divorce families has neglected the expressive or emotional aspects that are key elements of post-divorce everyday family practices. This chapter examines how the emotional experience of divorce is shaped by the social, economic, cultural, and legal context in which it occurs. Drawing on qualitative longitudinal data from separated...

This paper examines the practice of intlawulo and its implications for theorising fathering and masculinity from an African perspective. Based on in-depth interviews with isiXhosa unmarried fathers, the article outlines how fathering practices are shaped by customary practices that include relational negotiations with maternal and paternal families...

This paper examines how low-middle-income, employed black South African women in multigenerational households are key providers and face numerous demands for economic and practical support from a wide range of dependents. It argues that although women’s role in financially supporting families is not a new phenomenon, the co-existence of high levels...

Categorically-targeted social assistance programmes have considerable potential to reduce poverty and buttress the dignity of disadvantaged groups of people, but they can also generate tensions over financial support and care within households and families. This is especially likely in contexts in the global South where landlessness and unemploymen...

It is not always clear, through policies or law, where and when family responsibility ends. This article outlines the tensions that underlie policy and legal conceptions of obligation and everyday obligations that shape typically gendered patterns of care in families in South Africa. An examination of court cases reveals that the court found practi...

This article examines how women in South Africa, in challenging marital violence, navigate relations of patriarchal domination through appeals to the state, familial channels, or a combination of both. Using Kandiyoti’s concept of “patriarchal bargains,” the article describes how women during family meetings draw upon the state to challenge patriar...

There is no typical father in South Africa. There are many types of fathers and many types of fatherhood in the country. There are biological fathers, social fathers, gay fathers, straight fathers, young fathers, older fathers. We have selfidentified fatherhood, ascribed fatherhood, long-distance fatherhood and proximal fatherhood, to name only a f...

The post-apartheid state in South Africa inherited a care regime that historically combined liberal, social democratic and conservative features. The post-apartheid state has sought to deracialise the care regime, through extending to the African majority the privileges that hitherto had been largely confined to the white minority, and to transform...

Based on an empirical study of marital dissolution, this article explores the race, class, and gender dimensions of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (120 of 1998) (RCMA). Drawing on data from court (divorce) files and semi-structured interviews, it provides an intersectional critique of the laws for customary wives who seek to regulate ma...

The Recognition of Customary Marriages Act has been a welcome legislative effort to remedy the vulnerabilities experienced by women in the dissolution of their customary marriages. Through an analysis of research findings, this article contributes to the debate about the achievement of the Act’s objectives. We argue that the Act is falling short in...

This chapter explores the experiences of the ‘dependants’, a group of mothers and fathers who engage in a joint parenting arrangement but with little communication between the divorced parents. The parents, who were part of one-and-a-half-income marital households, make an effort to balance a sense of family life while trying to be autonomous in th...

Alan’s words reflect the complexity of feeling—conflict and anger—experienced by one father eight years after separating from his wife. His experience is not unique. This chapter demonstrates how experiences of conflict are related to wider issues of gender and power from a relational perspective. Following on from the previous chapter, it probes m...

‘Marriage falls out of favour for young Europeans as austerity and apathy bite’, reads the headline of an article in The Guardian in 2014 concerning the changes in marriage rates across Europe. Citing a series of experts across a range of EU states, the journalist argues that the behaviour of people in relation to birth, marriage and family formati...

Sally’s words characterise common frustrations among divorcees about their personal circumstances and individual, difficult experiences in a relationship being reduced to divorce statistics. A focus on increasing divorce rates pervades a range of writing about the family within the media, politics and policy reports. Increasing divorce rates are al...

I began this account of divorce and family life by discussing a newspaper article entitled ‘An Unusual Marriage’. This emphasised the degree of support, care and connection between a couple who had been divorced for 30 years. Yet how ‘unusual’ was the marriage between Sarah Clethero and John Challenor? The findings in this book reveal the many ways...

This chapter offers the reader a better long-term insight into the divorce experience. In 2014 I went back to speak to a smaller group of the participants who were willing or able to continue participation in the study. In revisiting them and listening to their accounts after six years had passed, I captured the ways in which the experience and pro...

This book focuses on parental commitment to family life after divorce, in contrast to its common perception as an irrevocable breaking up of the family unit, which is often perpetuated by representations from popular culture and the media. In the first detailed review of emotions and emotion work undertaken by divorced parents, the author sheds lig...

In 2013 The Guardian newspaper featured an article about a separated couple who co-resided when the former husband became ill and the former wife, Sara Clethero, took care of him in her home (Moorhead 2013). The headline depicted the relationship as an unusual marriage. There are many interpretations as to what was unusual about the marriage. First...