Marginal (m)others: Lone parents and female household headship in the Philippines

Abstract

Although women‐headed households are a growing presence in several parts of the developing world, they are still relatively uncommon in the Philippines. In many respects this is anomalous since the Philippines is marked by a number of economic, demographic and social features which elsewhere in Southeast Asia and in other developing countries are associated with increases in female household headship. With reference to primary survey data and case study material from low‐income communities and selected occupational sectors in three localities of the Philippine Visayas, this article attempts to identify reasons for the limited incidence of women‐headed households. One of the main findings is that routes into female household headship tend to be blocked by low rates of conjugal separation. This is largely due to the lack of legal divorce and to strong religious and moral pressures on married couples to stay together. Moreover, since living without a male partner increases the social stigmatisation attached to the state of lone motherhood, when women become separated or have children out of wedlock, they may reside within the homes of parents or senior kin as a means of reducing their visibility. At the same time, variations are found in levels of female headship according to occupational group, with female sex workers being more likely to head independent households. The study explores the reasons for these variations with special attention to the social marginalisation of female‐headed households in the Philippine Visayas, and to the construction of lone mothers as a negative ‘other’.