Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Agency amidst adversity: poverty and women’s reproductive lives 109
‘nucleated’ or necessarily ‘child-centred’ in the sense suggested by
Caldwell. The younger women in my stories have borne smaller
numbers of children but remain primarily a part of female-headed
households or of fragmented extended families. Given signs of child
neglect (limited feeding, late entry into schools, early end to
schooling and the like), the movement towards smaller numbers of
children does not appear to be altruistic attempts to assure ‘quantityquality’
trade-offs as rationalistic discourse would suggest, but, is in
a sense, a ‘women-centred’ response to limited economic means and
high levels of insecurity.
The fact that life circumstances for, in particular, most women in
Winterveld are not improving, but remain harsh, offers some
credence to Lesthaeghe’s 52 views on how living with economic
hardship over lengthy periods of time may result in definite attempts
to limit and control child-bearing. Rather than smaller family size
being associated with signs of upward economic and social mobility, 53
it is linked in Winterveld with resistance to poverty. The two
responses below, extracted from the life histories of two young
women, are typical responses to questions on marriage and childbearing.
KS said 54 : ‘My main aim is to find work. I will want to be about thirty
years old when I marry ... and have another child. The man I marry must
be educated. He must be supportive and not ‘mess around’.
MG said 55 : ‘I want to have a career. Marriage is something for later ...
When I fell pregnant my boyfriend said the baby was not his. His mother
and sister were talking for him. He gives them money. They did not want
me to have any of it ... I am bringing up my daughter myself ... I need
money for her food and clothes ... I think two children is a good number
of children.
My original research report contains detailed probing of the linkages
between women’s work, or lack thereof, and reproduction. I will omit
such quantitative analysis from this paper and make only a few
related cursory observations. Macro-level quantitative data in South
African research consistently find an association between
occupational category and reproduction — eg unskilled workers have
higher fertility than skilled workers. 56 Whilst this kind of categorising
is important, we need closer interrogation of motivations in
‘moments’ when people face the prospect of unemployment or lose
their jobs unexpectedly. Women in economically insecure situations
were revealed, in the micro-survey, to want to delay or avoid
pregnancies and women in secure jobs were less ‘unhappy’ about
52
RJ Lesthaeghe in Lesthaeghe (n 8 above) 475.
53 Caldwell & Caldwell (n 12 above) 250.
54 Interview, KS, 11 October 1998, Winterveld.
55
Interview, MG, 8 November 1998, Winterveld.
56 du Plessis (n 20 above).