Working Women in Rural South Africa: Conflicts and Contradictions

In South Africa, economic liberalization and the technological innovations in the mining sector have altered employment opportunities for rural Xhosa. Young men struggle to find jobs as labor migrants, while some young women find work in villages. These women assume provider roles for their families that are reminiscent of longstanding normative masculine achievements. They also use their income to achieve relative independence. Although many households depend on working women, they nevertheless attract criticism. Women mobilize a discourse of "human rights" to defend their position in these conflicts, even as men argue that "human rights" enable women's wayward behaviour. Drawing on fieldwork in the Eastern Cape, this article argues that working women provoke controversy because of how they trouble gendered meanings attached to work, domesticity, and social reproduction. I show that although they challenge the patriarchal domestic order through lifestyle choices and overt appeals to the "right" to remain single, the strategies that working women deploy to manage conflicting expectations and a heavy workload also reproduce patriarchal domestic hierarchies. In so doing, they further exclude young men from social reproduction. By situating their struggle in a discursive framework of "human rights," single women find ways of occupying seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously.