Marriage at the Drop of a Hat
Housing and Partnership in South Africa's Urban African Townships, 1920s-1960s
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4873987 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Posel (0000-0002-3343-875X, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 57-76 |
| Publication date | 2006-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dbi049 |
| OpenAlex | W2128722610 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 2 |
This paper holds a lens to the politics of marriage in South Africa's urban African townships, by way of a study of so-called ‘house marriages’: marriages transacted for the sake of a house. This was a mode of marriage that flouted all the established norms of Christian and customary marriage; yet it proliferated, and by the late 1960s, accounted for a significant proportion of partnerships in South Africa's cities and towns. The paper shows that this trend marked in the first instance the increasingly interventionist role played by the South African state in producing the sphere of African domesticity, along with the conditions of sexual and emotional intimacy. But the profusion of house marriages was also bound up with cultural shifts within urban African communities. While house marriages were persistently condemned as immoral and inauthentic by some, other township residents took a different view. Over time, the meaning of these partnerships was refashioned, so that house marriages were increasingly normalized as a legitimate, even respectable, mode of partnership.
General partnership · Geography · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Gender Studies · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa · South African History and Culture
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A Select Bibliography of South African History
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The Bond of Education
Lost dreams? Tales of the South African city twenty years after apartheid
Land as Home in South Africa
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Social Engineering and Revolutionary Consciousness
Labour, Lodging and Linkages
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2024 (17) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |