The Motherload’, describes the highly gendered, mostly invisible, and undervalued care work that mothers undertake and which hinders their well-being, safety and economic security, say the writers.
Ameeta Jaga, Fiona Ross, Feranaaz Farista
On International Day of Care and Support (October 29) we recognise that mothers have a revered place in families and history.
They ensure reproduction, their bodies host the foetus, birth children and provide sustenance and care, without which the infant would die.
But why are they still subjected to judgement and hyper-surveillance if they are so important?
Recently, a mother expressing breast milk at a Starbucks coffee shop in Cape Town was asked to cover up so as to not offend other customers.
A social media storm ensued. Public comments included that she should have expressed in the bathroom, covered up, expressed at home before going out, or just stayed at home.
Some people argued that while breastfeeding in public was okay, expressing was unacceptable, yet the aim of both is to sustain infant life. The company apologised, but the damage was done.
The public energy around infant feeding laid bare the overwhelming social judgement that mothers of all classes face in relation to their mothering and unpaid care work, and the ease with which the general public makes punishing evaluations of mothers.
Low-income mothers face even more pernicious judgements, the pervasive and damaging effects of which have become clear in a UCT-led collaborative project, “The Motherload”.
The project is implemented with support from UCT, Canada’s International Development Research Centre and Global Affairs Canada, and partners with the South African Medical Research Council, University of KwaZulu-Natal, the Western Cape government, Flourish, and The School of Hard Knocks.
The project aims to explore the burden of care in conditions of poverty and adversity, foregrounding mothers’ cognitive, mental, emotional and physical labour in the work of raising children and providing care for dependants.
It has already highlighted the importance of mothers’ multifaceted care to their children and others. This includes presence, protection, nutrition, education, and love, and also the experience of worry, fear, and concerns about safety and well-being that, for many mothers, are all-consuming.
These contribute to what we term “The Motherload”, describing the highly gendered, mostly invisible, and undervalued care work that mothers undertake and which hinders their well-being, safety and economic security. Adversity includes being without adequate social support, living in inadequate housing, in unsafe and unsanitary environments, and daily struggles to make ends meet.
Mothers go hungry so that they can feed their children; they have no time to “switch off” from protecting their children in gang-ridden communities; jobs are limited, offered mostly to men, and designed without an understanding of the high cost of commutes and childcare. This means that accessing employment puts mothers in debt. Service infrastructures such as adequate health, sanitation and housing consistently fail low-income mothers, adding to the juggle and hustle of making do.
Mothers express a major concern that despite adverse conditions, they are held to impossible standards of mothering. These include being constantly available, patient and attentive, providing all material needs so that children are socially included, educating children when the school has not covered the curriculum, and managing household tasks and physical childcare demands.
Instead of being met by community support, they experienced hyper-surveillance and punishing social judgement about how they enact these unrecognised, endless unpaid care responsibilities.
High rates of gender-based violence and gendered exclusion demonstrate that our society, unlike many in Africa, doesn’t value mothers. This is particularly true when it comes to low-income mothers.
When care work is ignored, misrecognised or under-supported, the strain on carers, mostly women, is immense. It carries physical, emotional and social costs. Harsh judgments of mothers ignore the unbearable realities of social life in poverty.
If mothers ‘fail’ to achieve unrealistic standards, they are stigmatised and quickly fall out of community circles that could potentially sustain them. Judgement is public and lasting.
One of its effects is to make people socially marginalised, reducing their self-worth, their access to support, services and sustenance, and undermining their capacities to care.
Our work has also demonstrated that for low-income mothers, the state is largely absent. When it is present, it is also judgemental. Think only of the debates about young mothers trying to access childcare grants, or former president Jacob Zuma’s suggestion that pregnant teens be held on Robben Island, or the dehumanising treatment many women receive in health centres, the humiliating shuffle between bureaucratic processes that shape everyday life, including UIF applications for maternity leave – a process so time and labour intense that many mothers forego this “benefit” meant to financially sustain them after giving birth.
When the state fails to recognise care or to offer it, the critical role of mothers in society is denied.
We asked, “What does a society that cares for mothers look like?” We expected to hear stories of need – safe shelters for women suffering abuse, access to decent work, and better safety. And we did.
But we heard more. Mothers spoke powerfully of the ways that their care work is undervalued, undermined and held against them.
They asked for less judgement, more recognition of the labour, invisible and visible, that goes into mothering, more inclusive social support from fathers, families, and society –more community.
The Starbucks incident shows how far we have to go in South Africa to have the full spectrum of unpaid care work acknowledged, valued and supported in society, even among the wealthy. If a person is a person through people – the mantra of ubuntu – then we should start by extending a more generous and supportive hand to mothers.
* Jaga is Professor of Organisational Psychology, UCT; Ross is Professor of Anthropology, UCT; and Farista is a lecturer in Organisational Psychology, UCT.
Cape Times