No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Turning Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in Postapartheid South Africa
Abstract
* This article is based on research conducted as part on the UNRISD Program on Gender and Social Policy in Developing Countries. A version of this paper will appear in Shahra Razavi and Shireen Hassim, eds., Gender and Social Policy in Developing Countries (2006). I would like to thank Beth Goldblatt and Francie Lund for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.
1. For an extensive discussion of these political processes, see Hassim (2002).
2. For a more extensive discussion of the women’s movement, see Hassim (2004).
3. The emphasis on the “primary caregiver” rather than the mother or even guardian was a small but important shift. As Sainsbury and others have shown, the basis of welfare entitlements is a crucial aspect of welfare states. Entitlements that privilege the head of household tend to undermine women’s independent access to benefits. On the other hand, emphasis on motherhood can equally narrow women’s access to benefits by imposing moral regulation on women. In the South African case, the emphasis on the primaiy caregiver recognizes the work of childcare regardless of who performs it-an important factor in a context in which care giving is the responsibility of aunts and grandparents. See Sainsbury (1996). See also Fraser and Gordon (1994).
4. Paradoxically, the Democratic Party, which in many respects can be seen as the party of business, has supported the introduction of BIG.
... However, the 300% increase in the CSGs and its predominance (67%) nationally over the other grants, reflects the conditions under which 8 million children live, in families with low 'means-test compliance' income. Earlier studies indicated that OAPs maintained the whole family and by 1999, nine million people benefited from the OAP (Hassim: 2005), whereas there were only 6 million recipients in 2003 (Table 3). Statistics SA Report on Income and Expenditure (2007) states that one in ten households rely on state grants for at least half the family's total income. ...
... This research on Bophelong and the national picture discussed above indicate a daily struggle for (12 million) recipients, of which 67% are black women with children. Since SA's first democratic elections in 1994, there is a significant increase in social inequality amongst black people (Terreblanche: 2002), especially amongst black women (Hassim: 2005, Makgetla: 2004. For some (Lehulere: 1999, Bond: 2000, and Seekings&Nattrass: 2006, this is linked to the implementation of the government's neoliberal Growth Economic and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy in 1996. ...
... This is exacerbated by GEAR policies such as the privatisation of basic services, increased user fees for education and health care, jobless growth and precarious forms of work (Van Driel: 2005). Makgetla (2004) and Hassim (2005), argue that Black women are more adversely affected by poverty and rising unemployment. ...
In post Apartheid South Africa 12.4 million people receive a social grant. This paper discusses the significance of the grants, and black women's role through the prism of the grants. The paper is based on a case study in Bophelong township near Johannesburg. The methodology draws on primary and secondary sources, a small socio economic survey, indicative interviews with black women grant recipients, and the relevant literature. The principle of 'triangulation' is used to validate research findings. For a substantial number of families, especially single women with children, the grant is their sole income. Black women provide the necessary (unpaid) labour and care for children on a 'hand to mouth existence', but the grant does not assist recipients to break the cycle of poverty. The patterns of social reproduction in post-apartheid South Africa reinforces patterns of patriarchy inherited from apartheid, and reinforces the surbordinated position of women in society. The role of women as carers hampers black women's mobility to seek work and/or educational opportunities. Despite far-reaching Constitutional rights, the state, through the nature of the social grants, inadvertently reinforces the subordinate and unequal position of black women, structurally responsible for the caring for the young and the aged. This is indicative of neoliberal accumulation and social reproduction in post apartheid SA.
... Social policies often make assumptions about what happens within families and can overlook the gendered burden of care in families. In South Africa, scholars have criticised the norms and assumptions that are built into family policies in South Africa (Hassim, 2005;Hochfeld, 2007;Mokomane, 2013;Rabe, 2017;Sevenhuijsen, et al., 2003). There are grave concerns about the way the policies adopt a narrow family form as their reference point in a country where multi-generational households comprise 62 percent of households where children live (Hall and Mokomane, 2018). ...
... It is in this context that it has been argued that family policies and the welfare system more broadly is based on 'popular conceptions of gender roles that remain locked into conventional, familialist paradigms. ' Hassim (2005;643) argued that this approach adversely affects working class black South African women, who carry the burden of the crisis, not the state. ...
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 practices of intergenerational financial support amongst diffuse kin relations and ruled that the social insurance system (Road Accident Fund) was obliged to continue these following the death of a breadwinner in a road accident. The Road Accident Fund contested this responsibility by disputing the legal obligation of the deceased to support the kin member. The cases highlight the lack of coherence in policy and law concerning the agreed social norms about the family. On the one hand, the RAF’s approach reproduces the gendered assumption of care, i.e. the role of the state is reduced, and the onus is placed on working class black South African women to take care of themselves and their families. On the other hand, the judiciary’s focus on social practices of care rather than rights is applauded for being transformative. I argue that the state’s ambiguous approach to recognising committed care work results in a situation where people have to ‘win’ their case in court and consequently leaves the care of family members to the unpaid and paid resources of women.
... In its South African instantiation, this separate strand of the global discourse focuses on achieving growth within the national economy in the democratic era (Plantinga and Adams 2021). This discourse could be built upon some progressive policy advances achieved under apartheid as well as in the democratic era (Hassim 2005). ...
... In its South African instantiation, this separate strand of the global discourse focuses on achieving growth within the national economy in the democratic era (Plantinga and Adams 2021). This discourse could be built upon some progressive policy advances achieved under apartheid as well as in the democratic era (Hassim 2005). ...
... 87 Programmes to address the economic disadvantage of women are also offered by poverty alleviation strategies within the social welfare system, through programmes such as the community based public works programme, funded by the social security and welfare budget, and via social assistance grants. 82 Again, the constraints of available resources and competing priorities have not yielded satisfactory coverage by these programmes. For example, social grants provide assistance to poor girls and boys through the child support grant for children under-14 years, and the foster care grant for children less than 18 years. ...
Mental health is a neglected topic, and that of women's mental health even more so, with the latter receiving little attention within the South African public health sector. This chapter provides a selective, focused overview of women's mental health issues requiring public sector attention in South Africa. It reports global and South African prevalence rates and burden of disease estimates for common mental disorders in women, focusing on depressive and anxiety disorders. Several key factors which impact on the mental health status of South African women are discussed, namely gender disadvantage, poverty, gender violence, HIV and peripartum depression. Policy and programme implications of women's mental health issues are noted, and recommendations for effecting a comprehensive, multi-sectora approach to improving the mental health status of women are outlined.
... Transcending the scope of these policy changes in the inherent patriarchal structures that pervade their lives (Hassim 2005), South African women have managed to play an important role in public life and contribute as a part of the economically active population. In certain cases, women have also overcome the traditional notions of prescribed gender roles by becoming primary or sole breadwinners in their homes. ...
As part of a larger Master's study, this paper focuses on the individual experiences of agency and autonomy communicated by a group of South African women who have overcome traditional notions of gender through their role as primary financial provider for their families. Using data collected from in-depth, unstructured interviews, and reading these through a phenomenological feminist perspective, I shed some light on the perceptions of ten female breadwinners (FBW) in this paper. It is the aim of this research to represent these women's voices in order to understand how they make meaning of and negotiate their spaces and roles as breadwinners. In the course of the interviews and analyses, the realities faced by these FBW stemming from the Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces expose the hegemonic and heteronormative prescriptions of gender that still exist within our society, often concealed behind constructions of reform advocating gender equality. Keywords: Female Breadwinner, South Africa, Gender Roles, Feminism, Psychology, Phenomenology.
... The country has the highest percentage of people who are trapped in the vulnerable context and this has pushed the government to introduce more determined goals on alleviating poverty, reducing inequality and emancipate women (World Bank, 2012). Hassim (2005) states that the reason social grants have an ability to supplement women's income is the foundation for the disparaging comment that women who knowingly access what is regarded as the thigh grant. Thigh grant refers to those women who meaningfully have babies in order to access the child support grant. ...
This paper censoriously assesses the role of women in improving access to food at the household level. The role of women is essential in the production of food as caretakers of household food security. However, their role is not well recognised, more especially in policymaking and resource allocation. This study was conducted through a qualitative approach with an exploratory research design. The participants were sampled with convenience sampling and interviewed with semi-structured interviews. Content analysis was employed as a tool for data analysis. The study adopted feminisation of poverty as a primary theory of this paper. Certain aspects of the study reveal that women have been struggling to access food from the diversity of retail vents that are obtainable in town because of low income and limitations of transport service. This is a constraint to women who depend on the off-farm sources of income because their household’s livelihood depends on purchasing food from retail vents. Those who rely on home gardens were experiencing low productivity and the unsustainability of their gardens. This has been caused by water scarcity and climate change. Therefore, women must be provided with training that seeks to develop their skills on how to make effective use of home gardens so that food security can be ensured.
... However, among income-eligible mothers, a higher percentage of non-recipients are 12 On this, see Hassim (2005) and Steele (2006). 13 The equivalent of an American high school diploma. ...
... One impetus for this was to protect children in polygynous families. 22 Lesbigay family rights. In the new Constitution's first decade, gay and lesbian South Africans garnered stunning new de jure rights and protections. ...
This article investigates the often cited and dismissed, but rarely examined, relationship between legalizing same-sex marriage and polygamy. Employing a comparative historical analysis of U.S. and South African jurisprudence, ideology, and cultural politics, we examine efforts to expand, restrict, and regulate the gender and number of legally recognized conjugal bonds. South African family jurisprudence grants legal recognition to both same-sex marriage and polygyny, while the United States prohibits and resists both. However, social and material conditions make it easier to practice family diversity in the U.S. than in South Africa. Our analysis of the very different histories of polygamy and same-sex marriage in the two societies suggests the centrality of racial politics to marriage regimes, yielding paradoxical narratives about the implications of legal same-sex marriage for the future of polygamy and sexual democracy. If there is a slippery marital slope, we argue, it does not tilt in a singular or expected direction.
... Women work mainly in low paid jobs as domestic workers, farm workers and in the service sector, all defined by the gender order as 'women's work'. They generally have lower incomes, higher unemployment rates and less access to assets than men (Hassim 2005). ...
This article argues that African working class households are the sites of a crisis of social reproduction in contemporary South Africa. Through a gendered analysis of five townships in Emnambithi the article demonstrates that African working class women are the shock absorbers of this crisis. While feminist scholars point to a growing crisis of social reproduction as a global phenomenon, the South African material illustrates how poor women experience this in the South.
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 of care and the changing socio-economic context, including the welfare system, low marriage rates, and higher levels of female employment, has created new conditions for caregiving responsibilities in multigenerational households. The paper fills a theoretical gap in the understanding of the hidden abode of reproduction and the full array of women’s responsibilities in financing household social reproduction.
This article reexamines the roots of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), the first national organization of women from all state-defined racial groups united against apartheid, founded in 1954. It argues that the deep history of public motherhood in southern Africa was what made FEDSAW possible: biological and symbolic motherhood had long been associated with responsibility for public social life in the region. Moreover, the article demonstrates that the first half of the twentieth century represented a time of profound transformation in the ways that women in southern Africa talked about and experienced motherhood. The influences of both missionary Christianity and international socialism encouraged women to claim that long-standing regional cultural forms of public engagements were an extension of private maternal responsibilities. African women talked about their public activism as emanating from an idealized private sphere to make themselves legible as social actors, both to agents of the white-controlled state and to allies in South Africa and across transnational networks. In turn, these allies emphasized their own public motherhood to legitimate themselves to African activists. Motherhood became a potent political discourse, even as activist women’s control over their actual homes and family lives diminished under state oppression. This analysis therefore intervenes in a long-standing debate within South African feminist scholarship over whether FEDSAW’s maternal politics were inherently conservative or radical by demonstrating that neither characterization is sufficient. FEDSAW’s maternal politics were multivalent because of the history of gendered political communication and compromise out of which they emerged.
A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men's intimacies and parenting in this country to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China, Unhitched decouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family--whether straight or gay--is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.
In April 1998, the post-apartheid South African government introduced a monthly cash transfer for children in poor households. A requirement for getting the grant was that the birth of the child had to be registered, and the adult primary caregiver had to have the citizen identity document. The success of the system of support was contingent on the new democratic government's ability to integrate into one national welfare system what had been fragmented under apartheid into many racially separated systems; it also, ironically, built on the apartheid-era state pension delivery system. Within a decade the grant reached more than ten million children, and was associated with a rapid increase in birth registrations, marking the poorest children's first step into citizenship, and opening up the possibility of later access to other programmes and entitlements.
This article looks at contemporary activism in Crossroads, South Africa – a famous symbol of women's defiance as one of the longest-surviving squatter camps under apartheid. In 1998 the Women's Power Group staged a four-month sit-in at City Council offices, demanding accountability for undelivered housing and public services. This was one of the first and most prolonged of what have become known as the post-apartheid or neoliberal period ‘new social movements’. The occupation unravelled into a year of violent conflict in the township and a subsequent Commission of Enquiry into the events. Official documents – even those that revolve around actions taken by women – focus on men acting violently. However, life histories of Women's Power Group (WPG) members tell a very different story about what women were thinking and doing. I first piece together the unfolding events through archival and oral history research. I then turn from looking at the history of struggle to looking at the struggle over history, where women's struggles were reframed in an official discourse of naive pawns of shacklords at best, and undeserving, impatient troublemakers at worst. Women's leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women's mobilising in Crossroads. The case of the Women's Power Group history points to how silences around complex processes of the demobilisation of women's movements – the reconfiguration of power that is not named or acknowledged – plays out in subsequent attempts to mobilise. The article aims to document and extend an important piece of post-apartheid history, and to spark discussion on processes of demobilisation, the significance of the gaps between multiple versions of women's protest over time, and the implications for ongoing struggles today.
One of the most fundamental questions for social scientists involves diffusion events; simply put, how do ideas spread and why do people embrace them? In The Diffusion of Good Government: Social Sector Reforms in Brazil, Natasha Borges Sugiyama examines why innovations spread across political territories and what motivates politicians to adopt them. In The Diffusion of Good Government: Social Sector Reforms in Brazil, Natasha Borges Sugiyama contributes significantly both to theoretical debates about diffusion and to important policy debates about the best ways to alleviate poverty, improve educational attainment, and increase access to health services in middle-income developing countries. Her substantial field research is coupled with strong quantitative analysis to deliver original interpretations important to scholars with an interest in public policy and Latin America. -James W. McGuire, Wesleyan University. Copyright © 2013 by the University of Notre Dame Press. All Rights Reserved.
In this paper I will analyze the fraught construction of new citizenship concept -inclusive, non-racial, non-sexist - in South Africa after apartheid - the so called democratic transition- focusing on women's citizenship.
Brazil's constitution (1988) granted muncipalities the responsibility of providing social services. Many observers anticipated that this newfound authority would produce policy diversity, as local governments would tailor programs to constituents' needs. Instead, many municipalities chose to replicate programs made famous elsewhere. What explains this diffusion of social policies across Brazil? Ill particular, what motivates policy makers to emulate "innovative" policies? This study compares three approaches that seek to explain political behavior: political self-interest, ideology, mid socialized norms. It draws on two policies, Bolsa Escola, all education program, and Programa Saude da Familia, a family health program, in four exemplary cities, to uncover the mechanisms that led to diffusion. Surprisingly, political incentives, such as electoral competition, cannot explain diffusiom Rather, ideology and socialized norms, transmitted through social networks, drive policy emulation. Diffusion occurs when politicians are ideologically compelled to replicate these programs and when policy specialists seek to demonstrate that they follow Professional norms.
Severe poverty persists in South Africa in spite of the country's existing social security programmes. Most of the poor live in households that receive no social security benefits at all, and the rest remain poor in spite of the benefits they receive. One of the major causes of the social security system's inability to secure adequate social protection is the low rate of take‐up of these programmes. Extremely poor individuals are likely to fail in large numbers to qualify for a grant with a complicated and expensive means test and application process. Social security reform that fails to address the structural problem of low take‐up is unlikely to yield substantial social benefits. A universal basic income grant, provided as an entitlement and without a means test, will more readily reach the poorest population. By removing the stigma that labels the recipient as “poor”, the grant bolsters economic support without draining psychological resources. Its universal nature addresses the problem of low take‐up, and dispensing with the means test lowers the cost of accessing the grant to both government and beneficiaries. Providing the grant as a fundamental right reduces arbitrary discretion, minimising opportunities for corruption. The basic income grant enables the social security system to reduce the poverty gap by 74%. The basic income grant also supports economic growth through facilitating the accumulation of human and social capital, and job creation, and bolstering aggregate demand in the economy. A well‐managed basic income grant programme is affordable and consistent with fiscal responsibility.
Under apartheid, the trappings of a welfare state for whites were created. Over time, social security was gradually extended to other groups, and recently social assistance benefits were equalised. This left South Africa with high social security levels for a middle-income developing country. However, the social security system still largely reflects the historical needs of vulnerable white groups under apartheid, among whom unemployment was minimal, given their preferential access to jobs and education. Thus the social security system now has inadequate provision for the most vulnerable, the unemployed. In contrast, four out of five pensioners receive a means-tested social pension — a major poverty-alleviating factor in rural black communities. This article analyses the social security system against the backdrop of apartheid and the more recent democratisation, and assesses its major deficiencies, the forces acting for its expansion and the binding fiscal constraint.