Childcare dilemmas

The women of Sul do Save and the women of Tarana were disproportionately widowed, divorced and separated. Dozens of narrators became single mothers when their husbands died leaving them to support the children alone. Many women simply said their children ‘had no fathers.’ They had always looked after their children alone. Some women said they had ‘problems’ with the fathers of their children, so had to support their children alone. Everyone echoed Amélia Chiconela and Rabeca Notiço's mantra: to have enough to eat you had to go to work, but while you were at work someone had to care for your children.

Perhaps nothing was more difficult for the women of Tarana than the fact that staying at home to care for their children was undercut by their need to leave their children and go to work so they could earn the money to feed their children. Despite Parente and Neto's correlation between higher wages and higher absenteeism at Cajú, women and supervisors with decades of experience were perfectly clear about why women missed work: they or their children were ill, or a family member had a serious crisis. The long work day, poverty, seasonal malaria in areas with a lot of standing water, inadequate supplies of clean water and inappropriate handling of sewerage in their neighbourhoods made it much more likely that people would fall ill, especially young children. Women remembered nothing worse about the colonial era than that supervisors pressured women to return to work immediately after childbirth, and dismissed illness and bereavement as appropriate reasons for missing work. Many women, fearing loss of their jobs or simply loss of wages, returned to work ill or left a sick child at home.

Clearly bearing, nursing and rearing children comprised a very large component of most women's daily work during their childbearing years. As women aged, many continued to sustain household reproductive labour, providing for grown children, nieces, nephews, siblings and grandchildren. Most women stoically accepted that their fertility was largely out of their hands. Older women had few options for birth control: ‘We had many children. It was not for us to say. We had the number of children God destined for us.’ Some women expressed gratitude that God reconsidered their destiny.