Angry men and working women

Abstract

The paper attempts to contextualise and explain an extraordinary incident of public violence which occurred in Qwaqwa in the mid‐1980s and which involved a collective assault on working women by unemployed men in the bantustan town of Phuthaditjhaba. To explain this event, the paper explores the changing material context and cultural constructions of households in this bantustan over time. The central argument developed below is that, while the actions of the unemployed men were certainly a direct response to their deteriorating employment prospects, the violence itself cannot be explained without appreciating, firstly, the differential impact of changing material conditions on the culturally specific understandings of gender relations in urban and closer settlement households and, secondly, the manner in which these changes challenged existing notions of masculinity in Qwaqwa.