Male trouble: independent women and male dependency in a white working-class suburb of Pretoria

Abstract

abstract The suburbs on the western side of Pretoria were a seat of the white, Afrikaans-speaking working-class for decades before they were irrevocably transformed by changes in national politics and the nature of heavy industry in the region. This focus reports on part of a larger study investigating social change in response to political and economic transformation. Considering the so-called ‘feminisation’ of the labour market, it examines how a single mother household, run by an independent woman, negotiates challenges posed by an increase in unemployed men's dependency on the economic access held by women. Six months of intensive participant observation reveals the way younger, unemployed men in Pretoria's west apply their masculine identities to negotiate domestic security, even if conventional traits of masculinity, like employment, elude them. The focus also looks at the strategies women adopt to cope with these challenges, even if they subscribe to the expectations created by a lingering patriarchal narrative.