‘I am Alone. I am a Woman. What are my Children going to Eat?’ Domestic Workers and Family Networks

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to take seriously the oral testimonies of 13 retired domestic workers, and thereby articulate the multi-layered nature of their life experiences by bringing together their family life and working life as a separate topic. Through these micro-histories this article constructs the intimate networks which frame the worlds that the women inhabit in the various stages of their lives. Overwhelmingly, these are family networks which are female-dominated, cross-generational and child-centred; while a male presence is – quite importantly and interestingly – often peripheral and fleeting. While there have been several insightful South African works examining the experiences of domestic work in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa, there has been very little combined exploration of the domestic worker and her family life beyond the works of Deborah Gaitskell, and Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe. This article thus takes the figure of the domestic worker into relatively unexplored territory, and in doing so begins to dislodge the often nationally assumed image of the domestic worker from a victim of historical forces of oppression, to an agent whose self-definition is the sum total of her life experiences.

Keywords:

• domestic workers
• family life
• Hammanskraal
• motherhood
• oral history