Women’s Month raises both hope and hopelessness. South Africa’s much-lauded constitution supports pro-woman legislation, prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender, promotes female education and employment, makes provision for maternity leave, and protects and promotes reproduction rights. High investment in a social wage system that includes social grants and free or subsidised access to basic amenities is designed to support the wellbeing of citizens, particularly the disadvantaged.
On paper, we have made significant advances in gender equality. Yet, in reality, the benefits are unevenly distributed, creating an hierarchy of access to rights. Low-income mothers are at the bottom of it. This raises critical questions: who has access to rights and services promised in the constitution? Who does not? Why? What hinders the realisation of rights and their materialisation in improved lives for all? Why do policies not achieve their desired effects in the lives of low-income women?
Gender, class, enduring racialised histories of exclusion, disability and norms that devalue care and frame it as “women’s work” all influence the effectiveness of policy, sometimes in unanticipated ways. To ensure that rights are equitably accessed, we need an approach that accounts for how such social stratifying factors interact, enabling some people and incapacitating others.
One area that needs scrutiny is that of unpaid care work. In South Africa, studies show that for every three hours that women spend on unpaid care work, men spend one, and global studies show that women’s hours are higher in low-income contexts. Such studies only consider physical effort, and not the invisible emotional and mental labour involved in care — planning and organising, seeking resources to afford to care, navigating judgment from others and managing the affective load that comes with care work. This multidimensional load is exacerbated in conditions of hardship.
Since the beginning of 2022, a multisectoral team has been collaborating on “The Motherload” project. The team comprises academics from the University of Cape Town, the South African Medical Research Council and the University of KwaZulu-Natal; women’s rights groups Flourish and the School of Hard Knocks, a group of low-income mothers; and the Western Cape government.
The concept 'motherload' describes the highly gendered, mostly invisible and undervalued work performed by those who undertake mothering, and which hinders their economic security, safety and wellbeing
The project set out to understand the multiple dimensions of care faced by low-income women, and to identify their struggles and needs. The work quickly revealed the social, emotional, policy and infrastructural failures that make care work exhausting. The concept “motherload” describes the highly gendered, mostly invisible and undervalued work performed by those who undertake mothering, and which hinders their economic security, safety and wellbeing. The study flagged the need to move away from the prevailing top-down process of policy development towards foregrounding mothers’ lived realities and their expertise.
Policy is often made without considering either context or other governmental interventions in the same social spaces. This lack of connection makes access to government services difficult. For example, a mother must access multiple service points — health care, education, housing, social development and labour — instead of being able to access them at a single site and at one point in time. Moreover, unreliable and unsafe public transport, poor sanitation, the high cost of quality childcare and nutritious food, high levels of crime and violence, and difficulties in finding employment makes care work more challenging.
Some of the solutions offered actually make problems worse. Women in our project described how, when mobile clinics are situated in dangerous areas, they must pay someone to accompany them for safety, only to arrive to discover that the clinic doesn’t have what they need and they are referred to other medical facilities, involving further cash layouts. Initiatives to improve employment are hostile to childcare needs and material conditions of poverty. For example, the government’s expanded public works programme doesn’t consider the cost of quality childcare and transport. Low-paid jobs, often touted as a panacea to joblessness and female exclusion from the workplace, often entail invisible costs, including childcare support.
The hustling required to get by in such circumstances is mostly invisible to policymakers, as are the social and emotional consequences, including harsh social judgment of mothers, shame, social alienation, exhaustion and the undoing of social codes such as ubuntu.
We can develop improved policies that are less harmful by taking people’s knowledge of their lives seriously. Doing so helps shed light on the invisible but crippling effects of poor policy and infrastructure on care challenges. Making low-income mothers’ complex realities visible can drive changes that will improve policy influences on their quality of life. By including carers as collaborators in shaping policy frameworks, policies can better address the hierarchies of wealth, education and gender that shape everyday life and render vulnerable women more exposed to poverty, violence and humiliation. Doing so can also help to shift gender norms and reframe care as vitally important.
“The motherload” needs urgent recognition and attention in policies, focusing on those women who get forgotten because the big picture of progressive gender rights looks good.
• Prof Jaga is the deputy dean of transformation and inclusion at UCT’s faculty of commerce. Prof Ross is head of the social anthropology department at UCT’s faculty of humanities
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