Consepts of motherhood in Southern Africa

Project summary

Mothering is a topic that is familiar to most of us. We all know something about mothering. We have a mother, we know mothers or we are mothers ourselves. Most of us have stories or opinions about mothering. According to Sharon Hays (1996), an American writer on women issues, many people have strong emotional responses to mothering.

Mothering has been going on everywhere at all times! And there is loads of information about mothers from ancient times until today, across several contemporary cultures.

A mother is commonly understood as a woman who has given birth to a child and /or is raising a child. The concept of mothering refers to the practices involved in caring for and raising a child. Reproduction, pregnancy and giving birth is primarily a biological process. But the norms and standards for care after birth giving are fully defined by society and culture. Within a culture, norms of parenting, mothering and fathering are often considered eternal and taken for granted (Gilhus, Karlsen Seim, & Viden, 2009).

Broadly speaking, mothering has been studied through either a positivist or an interpretative paradigm/framework (Arendell, 2000). In this paper I will use an interpretative approach where meanings are seen to be multiple and shifting, and highly context dependable.

The aim of this paper is to unpack and critically examine the familiar. This paper critically examines

1) How mothering as a theoretical concept has evolved in the social sciences.  

2) Explores the practices and norms of mothering in the Southern African region, by asking; what does mothering mean in Southern Africa, and who is taking on such a task here?  

 

 

Arendell, T. (2000). Conceiving and investigating motherhood: The decade’s scholarship. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62 (4), 1192-1207.

Gilhus, I.S., Karlsen Seim, T., & Viden, G. (2009). Farsmakt og moderskap i antikken: Spartacus Forlag

Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale: Yale University

O’Reilly, A. (2010). Twenty-first-Century Motherhood. New York: Columbia University Press.