Intergenerational life histories: Women's contrasting experiences of marriage and childbearing in a rural enclave

This paper draws on ethnographic material and life histories of a group of mothers and daughters living in the rural 10 Morgen section of the Winterveld area in the Northwest Province of South Africa. Thirty-three women representing an older and younger generation were invited to tell their life stories and reflect on significant and gendered experiences. The older women describe the early phases of their lives as heavily constrained in apartheid South Africa, with their performances of ‘womanhood’ and ‘motherhood’ habitually monitored by kin and familial networks. The younger women offer insight into rural women's maturation into adulthood amid major social and political upheavals and against the background of the gradual weakening of kin and marital systems in South Africa. This Briefing focuses on selected themes emerging out of the fieldwork, and pays specific attention to the different articulations of feminine identity, marriage and childbearing.