At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg

Three: Children and Leaving

90 tHree children and leaving Children deserve their own chapter. African or white, present or absent—they, more than anything else, set the stage for a woman’s emotional experience of domestic work and colored the way she regarded the things and scenes around her. The subject was a complicated and sensitive one, not least to the women concerned. Children, one’s own or one’s charges, could be the source of some of the most satisfying aspects of domestic work, but also some of the most frustrating and infuriating. One’s own children made the labors bearable, while white children could drive a woman to tears of aggravation. Others have described domestic workers, rightly, as being trapped between two worlds, their family home and the city.1 It was primarily their respective attachments to the various children in their lives that held them in that emotionally challenging and financially precarious position. Women had to juggle the strains of the job against the obligations to family, while honoring their own emotional, social, and spiritual needs. It amounted to a high-wire balancing act that many found impossible. When it got to be too much, some women left Johannesburg; others, in response to the stress of it all, elected to stay. Whatever a woman’s choice, children were almost always a factor. Many women found themselves working in white homes in the first place out of love for their children: “The day I stole away from my children cHildreN ANd leAViNg 91 I was so sad that if I had not had those children to get money for I’d have killed myself. They are the only reason I’m still here, the one reason I will go on doing this job that is killing me. At least it is giving life to them.”2 A woman with an absent husband or none at all could expect some assistance from her parents and other family members in raising her children, but among the poor, there often simply were not enough resources to go around. It was the mother who bore ultimate responsibility for her children ’s welfare—if not in theory, in practice—and she who was expected to make any sacrifice on their behalf. The brutal irony was that in order to provide for her children, a woman often had to leave them. And the work most women found to allow them to keep their own children clothed and fed involved clothing and feeding another woman’s child. Some women were employed specifically as nannies. This became increasingly true throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, as greater numbers of white women sought work outside the home. In this way, apartheid policy was out of touch even with white people’s reality. Influx-control policies became tighter as white South African families’ needs for nanny care intensified. Even women who were not hired explicitly as nannies often found themselves engaged in childcare, whether because of household circumstances, their own maternal longings, or a combination of both factors. Molly, for instance, had been hired by her Greenside employers in 1971 to do the cooking, washing, and cleaning. There were two small children in the house, and whenever the madam felt overwhelmed by the demands of the younger, she sought out Molly and had her stop whatever she was doing to take the baby: “She would call you any time, when that child started crying. ‘Oh, come and help me. I can’t stand it.’”3 Many women had similar experiences: “You can never get away. . . . The child will cry and she’ll [the madam] shout, ‘Flora, Cindy’s crying!’ She’s just lying on her bed or talking on the phone or her friends are visiting. I’m working and she’s doing nothing and I must always be there.”4 As testament to the degree to which African women, whether employed as nannies or in their general capacity as domestic workers, assumed childcare responsibilities within white homes, in a 1968 study an incredible 50 percent of white mothers reported that their social activities and outings had not been restricted at all by the arrival of children.5 While mothers usually set rules regarding tasks like bathing, feeding, and playtime, the 92 At Home witH ApArtHeid actual work was typically performed by the worker. (Fathers’ involvement was more limited. As a rule, white men played little or no role...