Women-headed Households: Global Orthodoxies and Grassroots Realities

Abstract

Recent increases in the number of women-headed households in most parts of the world have provoked growing public discussion, especially on lone motherhood. Debates have taken place in a wide range of arenas on both sides of the North—South divide — in political and governmental circles, in development institutions and NGOs, in academia, in religious organizations and in the mass media. A persistent thread running through discussions on lone mother households is that they are something of a ‘problem’, whether in terms of how they themselves fare in society or the difficulties they present for others (be these ‘close others’ such as their own offspring, or ‘distant others’ such as the state and policymakers). Wittingly or otherwise, these debates have often drawn on, as well as reproduced, a variety of negative stereotypes about their economic, social and psychological corollaries. Some stereotypes are found so frequently, and with such little substantiation by place- (and people-) specific evidence, that they seem to have assumed the status of ‘global orthodoxies’. Prominent among these stereotypes are that women-headed households are the ‘poorest of the poor’ and that they are ‘bad for children’.² Yet how accurately do such epithets reflect or represent the circumstances of lone mother households at the grassroots?