The virgin and the mother: schoolgirl stories and their implications for girls’ lives

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how discursive constructions of pregnant schoolgirls produce social and material consequences for girls in Southern Africa. Critical feminist scholars have argued that diverse actors frame girls across the global South as either monolithic, sexualised victims and sites for intervention or as hyper-agents, uniquely capable of changing the world. In either case, pregnancy is pathologised and girls’ education is put forth as the solution to untimely sexuality and poverty. Through an ethnographic study of student pregnancy in Malawi, I show how education actors leveraged stories of pregnant schoolgirls to inform curriculum, policy, and resource distribution; and how young women engaged with these stories in school. I focus in particular on three students. While my renderings of these girls’ stories are inherently partial, they demonstrate how binary discourse can shape girls’ educational access and retention, even as it misaligns with their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Pregnancy
• girls’ education
• discourse
• stories
• ethnography
• Malawi
• Africa

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge Prudence, Chisomo, Mary, and members of the Kaphiri CDSS community for their generosity of time and willingness to share stories with me. Thank you to Stella Makhuva for her keen insight, and to Nancy Kendall, Claire Wendland, and Madalo Samati for their mentorship. Project funding was provided by the NAEd/Spencer Foundation, Social Science Research Council, PEO International, and the UW-Madison Global Health Institute. Finally, many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Wendland’s (2022) exploration of competing stories of maternal death in Malawi is a recent exception.

2. For example, rather than give stipends to individual school-based participants, I provided an honorarium to the school community to be managed by local leadership. Participation in research activities beyond school-based observations included further consent-seeking, including and especially for home visits, where parental and student consent was required and for which families received a small package of household supplies (e.g. sugar).

3. See Khoja-Moolji (2016) and Buckler et al. (2021) for methodological suggestions.

4. Kaphiri CDSS serves approximately 200 youth from Zomba Town and the surrounding villages. Kaphiri is a pseudonym, as are the names of all project participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Philanthropic Educational Organization [PSA Scholar Award]; Social Science Research Council [International Dissertation Research Fellowship]; Spencer Foundation [Dissertation Fellowship]; University of Wisconsin-Madison [Global Health Institute Research Award].