Workplace Breastfeeding As Foodwork In Organizational Settings: Advancing Knowledge From Black,Low-Income Women In South Africa

Abstract

The cessation of breastfeeding by low-income mothers returning to work is a feminist concern. Our research advances knowledge from the Global South to extend understanding of breastfeeding at work as a form of foodwork in organizational settings. A major reason for breastfeeding cessation is the conflict between this foodwork labor and the physical labor of paid employment. In-depth interview data from 33 black low-income working mothers in South Africa were analyzed through an intersectional lens of race, gender, and social class. The findings yield both struggles and innovations in the mothers’ attempts to combine nourishing their children with paid employment. The paper explores three themes: (1) the labor of breastfeeding within contexts of low-income earning, (2) gender and social class norms shaping childcare and foodwork, and (3) local knowledge about foodwork and employment. We present recommendations for improving workplace support for low-income mothers’ breastfeeding efforts, and for advancing gender equity.

Feminist efforts to advance workplace support for lactating mothers and improve gender equity have contributed to increased knowledge over the past decade on breastfeeding and the lactating body in organizational settings (Gabriel et al. 2020; Gatrell 2019; Johnson and Salpini 2017). Little attention, however, has been given to breastfeeding as a form of foodwork, and the specific forms of physical labor performed by lactating mothers in paid employment in organizational settings (Wattis, Standing, and Yerkes 2013). In the domestic setting, foodwork is relatively well described. It refers to the “practices that form the key food activities and exchanges between mothers and children” (Wright, Maher, and Tanner 2015, 422), and includes planning, preparation, consumption, health considerations, and the emotional management of individuals’ eating habits (Meah 2014). Foodwork, however, is gendered (Swan 2020)—as women are disproportionately held accountable for it in families—often as an indicator of good mothering. Mothers must be resourceful as they identify places to purchase food, balance budgets, consider nutritional/health needs, and at times, “stretch-out” meals for the families’ sustenance (Parsons, Harman, and Cappellini 2024). Low-income women’s innovations have included taking on additional paid labor (Swan 2020) and resorting to fast food (Jabs et al. 2007). Mothers are expected to conduct these labor-intensive efforts out of love, to bring in the softer, more nurturing elements that constitute foodwork (Parsons, Harman, and Cappellini 2024).

Foodwork stands as an expression of women’s identities and self-conceptions, yet entrenched gendered expectations place the burden of managing these demands predominantly on women (Swan 2020). Those who mother can bear a specific foodwork responsibility if they choose to breastfeed, a form of maternal nourishment often overlooked in prevailing feminist discourse on foodwork. To our knowledge, there has been no study to date acknowledging breastfeeding as a form of foodwork in the workplace. This lack of scholarship not only hampers our understanding of the issue but also contributes to the absence of systematic workplace policies on breastfeeding, leaving lactating mothers, especially in the Global South, unsupported in navigating the intersection of their maternal and work obligations.

Barriers to breastfeeding in the workplace include a lack of appropriate private space to pump, storage for pumped breast milk, insufficient time to pump, and minimal supervisor and co-worker support (Trafford et al. 2020). Consequently, many mothers conceal their foodwork activities while at work (Gatrell 2013). Low-income mothers’ struggles to combine breastfeeding and employment tend to be exacerbated because they often hold precarious jobs, are easily replaceable, and may decline to exercise their rights in fear of losing their jobs. South Africa is a unique environment to explore this phenomenon, given its history of settler colonialism and apartheid, which contributed to the black majority being low-income (Moore and Seekings 2019). In this paper, we use “Black” and “black” to denote different meanings in the South African context. By black (lower case) we refer to the racial categories defined and discriminated against under apartheid, comprising colored, Indian, and Bantu. African, Black African, or Black (upper case) are the terms that have replaced “Bantu” since the advent of democracy in 1994 (Manzo 1998, 107). Both in South Africa and globally, black, low-income mothers’ struggles to perform the foodwork of breastfeeding with paid work are underpinned by intersecting structural barriers of racism, sexism, and income inequality (Asiodu, Bugg, and Palmquist 2021; Mirkovic et al. 2014).

Our paper’s contribution advances intersectional gendered theorizing of foodwork in the workplace by recognizing that breastfeeding and its associated foodwork tasks such as pumping and expressing should be deemed normative in the workplace for lactating mothers. These gendered shifts in workplace norms and practices are particularly important for making workplaces that employ black, low-income mothers more equitable. We respond to Lee’s (2018) call for rethinking and reconceptualizing the act of working to enable the labor of breastfeeding. Contemporary analyses of foodwork in organizational settings predominantly prioritize cognitive planning (e.g., Swan 2020), often neglecting the complex realities of breastfeeding. This oversight creates pronounced struggles for low-income mothers in low-wage jobs, whose workplaces offer limited private space and resources to facilitate continued breastfeeding after childbirth and returning to work. In Global South contexts such as South Africa, the majority of low-income populations are black, and their socioeconomic constraints exacerbate their time constraints, placing further challenges on their ability to combine breastfeeding and employment. We caution against universalisms that all working mothers have similar experiences, by emphasizing an intersectional lens and underscoring the material realities of low-income black women in a Southern context. Further, we extend understanding by highlighting not only the mothers’ struggles but also their capacity to generate innovative foodwork solutions that makes combining breastfeeding and employment more attainable.

We begin by articulating the study’s background in the South African context. Next, we theorize workplace foodwork through an intersectional framing, followed by presenting the study’s method and key findings. We conclude the paper with suggestions to support breastfeeding at work for more gender-equitable workplaces and societies in diverse contexts.

Background

In South Africa, the challenges faced by low-income mothers are deeply intertwined with historical, social, and economic factors. Apartheid policies of spatial displacement of black people to the urban periphery, stratified education by racial groups, with the Bantu education being least resourced, and limited employment opportunities for black people, especially black women, created a highly skewed workforce and society (Newton and Schuermans 2013). Thirty years after democracy, the impact of apartheid policies persists. Black low-income women continue to have mostly low-wage opportunities and contend with long, expensive commutes from their informal settlements on the urban periphery to their workplaces (Francis and Webster 2019; Moore and Seekings 2019). Forming 53.8 percent of the workforce in 2019, they are disproportionately represented in insecure, low-wage, and informal forms of labor-intensive work (Ewinyu and Shedi 2022). Low-income households in South Africa (55.5 percent) are typically female-headed (49.9 percent) by Black women (47.5 percent), and survive on an average of less than US$1.65 a day (United Nations 2020; World Bank 2023). They reside mostly in informal housing with limited access to essential services such as clean water and electricity (Francis and Webster 2019). Their foodwork and employment remain entangled within these colonial and apartheid histories in material realities of extreme poverty and social inequality.

Low-Income Women and Breastfeeding in Context

In South Africa, domestic workers hold the status of regular employees since being included in the formal economy in 1997. They are protected by a Sectoral Determination under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997 (South African Government 2024) ensuring the protection of their legal entitlements, such as maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks. For formally employed and domestic workers, South African legislation stipulates 4 months of partially paid (66 percent of monthly earnings) maternity leave from the Unemployment Insurance Fund, along with two 30-minute breastfeeding breaks at work per day until the child is 6 months old. Policy enforcement to protect and support breastfeeding at work, however, remains limited (Martin-Wiesner 2018). Compared with workers in formally registered organizations, there is a notable weakness in compliance and implementation by private homeowners/ employers (Kubjana 2016). South African exclusive breastfeeding rates remain low (31.6 percent, with an average duration of 2.9 months, the lowest rate on the African continent) (South African Demographic and Health Survey 2016).

Local materialities of black low-income mothers necessitate solutions grounded in the context of South Africa to advance support for combining breastfeeding and paid work, rather than uncritically adopting solutions from countries in the Global North, such as onsite creches. Their distance from their homes and complex commutes because of apartheid spatial planning makes workplace creches a less feasible option. Their precarious lives contribute to their early return to work out of economic necessity (Trafford et al. 2020), and the necessity of holding onto a job to reduce financial strains often outweighs their desire to continue breastfeeding (Siziba et al. 2015). Low-income women’s positions in the economy also tend to offer them less autonomy, bargaining capacity, and will to negotiate terms with their employer because they fear they will lose their jobs (Hagelskamp et al. 2011). Maponya, Janse van Rensburg, and Du Plessis-Faurie (2021) indicated that black South African mothers who returned to work after maternity leave encountered challenges in accessing space to breastfeed or pump even when workplace breastfeeding policies were in place. Work responsibilities, insufficient paid maternity leave, and hegemonic masculine workplace cultures add further barriers to breastfeeding in the workplace (Mabaso, Jaga, and Doherty 2020; Siziba et al. 2015).

Globally, studies have shown that black, low-income mothers are less likely to benefit from workplace policies and social support from supervisors and co-workers because they are often deemed easily replaceable (Lauer et al. 2019; Trafford et al. 2020). Rather, white, middle- and high-income mothers in professional occupations were more likely to have choices that included taking additional leave or resigning from employment to fulfill their breastfeeding activities, ultimately taking their foodwork outside the workplace, perpetuating the view that breastfeeding and paid work are incompatible. In some instances, white and middle-income mothers were also more likely than their black low-income counterparts to have a supportive working environment that combines breastfeeding and paid work, which helped them maintain a stable form of income (Kozhimannil et al. 2016; Setty, Skinner, and Wilson-Simmons 2020). In addition, white and middle-income mothers could afford to acquire expert knowledge and professional advice (e.g., a lactation specialist), to optimize and prolong breastfeeding after returning to work (Avishai 2007; Harrison 2019)—a time and financial cost unaffordable for low-income mothers. Accordingly, low-income black mothers found it more challenging to sustain breastfeeding, eliciting feelings of guilt and remorse for not upholding white middle-income public discourse ideals of good mothering (Hamilton 2016; Lankes 2022).

An Intersectional Framing for Workplace Foodwork

Intersectionality enables approaching breastfeeding, as a form of foodwork, beyond an individual level. It centers structural race, gender, and socioeconomic oppressions that intersect to produce inequalities in black low-income mothers’ experiences (Crenshaw 1991). As a framework for this study, intersectionality helps emphasize the complex interplay of motherhood, employment, and intersecting oppressive social structures created and perpetuated by the country’s colonial and apartheid histories, which shapes the struggles that black low-income women face in combining breastfeeding and employment.

Hegemonic masculine cultures, entrenched through patriarchal norms and settler colonialism, dominate South African workplaces. Such workplace cultures pose challenges for working mothers because of gendered expectations that mothers continue reproductive foodwork, but also engage in paid employment to support their families (Gatrell 2019). Mothers are tasked with the mental and physical labor of providing sustenance for their infants, navigating complex demands such as understanding their infant’s feeding needs, scheduling feeds around working hours, and investing in resources for storing and expressing breast milk, including pumps and bottles (Al-Attas and Shaw 2022). The labor-intensive nature of breastfeeding is often unrecognized as legitimate foodwork, despite requiring substantial time and financial resources from mothers (Parsons, Harman, and Cappellini 2024). Breastfeeding and lactating mothers, therefore, bear the primary responsibility for nourishing their infants within a gendered, individualistic care model.

Because lactating mothers need to pump breast milk at work while maintaining work performance, they occupy a murky territory that blends the personal and professional (Gatrell 2013). The “leaky” maternal body, associated with breast milk, threatens the social norms and expectations of a competent worker, and these expectations pressure mothers to conceal their lactating bodies and separate their foodwork demands from their jobs (Gatrell 2019).

Research further indicates that black, low-income mothers face additional stressors in balancing their foodwork obligations with employment (Szabo 2011; Wright, Maher, and Tanner 2015), compelling many working mothers to sacrifice either breastfeeding or employment (Trafford et al. 2020). In the South African context, their intersecting social identities of “black,” “woman,” “mother,” and “working class” expose them to complex forms of oppression, including structural inequalities, economic vulnerability, and poverty, leaving them particularly vulnerable (Witten et al. 2020). Rooted in colonial and apartheid legacies, black women’s labor was, and still is, heavily exploited in low-wage work such as domestic work in private homes as well as factory work, where they are easily replaceable. While continuing breastfeeding after returning to work may be a more cost-effective option to formula feeding for low-income mothers, out of economic necessity to hold on to their job, they may either give up breastfeeding and incur the high cost of formula or hide breastfeeding activities in the workplace, increasing their stress (Stumbitz and Jaga 2020; Trafford et al. 2020). In the context of South Africa’s high unemployment, those with limited skills and education, who tend to be black low-income women, are most at risk for losing paid work. Hence, despite legislated workplace breastfeeding breaks, this socioeconomic context makes foodwork challenging and stressful for low-income mothers in workplaces, constraining the extent to which they can exercise their rights to these breaks.

Our study illuminates breastfeeding as foodwork as an often-overlooked aspect of maternal labor, emphasizing the need for supportive workplace and social policies that recognize and accommodate the intricate realities of black mothers’ foodwork.

Methods

An exploratory qualitative research approach provided an in-depth intersectional understanding of how low-income mothers’ breastfeeding at work experiences are shaped by their interlocking social identities. After ethics clearance was granted from our institution’s faculty ethics committee, participants in Cape Town, South Africa, were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling to select information-rich cases (Patton 2002). Participants needed to have been employed during pregnancy, returned to work post-maternity leave, and attempted to breastfeed their infant. They had to have given birth to their child after 2011, following South Africa’s adoption of the Tshwane Declaration of Support for Breastfeeding, which was a commitment by government and other stakeholders including employers, managers, and civil society to protect, promote, and support breastfeeding (Tshwane Declaration 2011).

A final sample of 33 low-income mothers was reached. They ranged between 23 and 45 years old, were all “black,” self-identifying as either African Black (n = 11) or colored ¹ (n = 22), earned less than US$285 per month, and lived in low-income communities, informal settlements, and townships. The mothers were employed in low-wage jobs in diverse work settings encompassing both formal organizations such as factories, restaurants, retail stores, and the public sector, and domestic work in private homes. The varied organizational contexts presented both possibilities and constraints for these mothers. Interestingly, despite this, common challenges persisted across the diverse work environments. For instance, it was common for mothers not to assert their legal entitlements to breastfeeding in the workplace, and most encountered difficulties in getting their Unemployment Insurance Fund forms (required to access their partial maternity leave payment) completed by their employers. Although we did not explicitly inquire about union membership, the majority of clothing factory workers were unionized, reflecting the industry’s high union density rate of 88 percent (Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union 2023).

We collected data through face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews. All participants voluntarily provided written consent to be interviewed and recorded. Based on the participant’s preference, interviews were conducted in either English, Afrikaans, or isiXhosa. Research assistants who assisted with data collection were fluent in all three languages and served as interpreters. The interviews focused on the mothers’ experiences of working while pregnant, regulations around workplace maternity support, strategies for managing work and foodwork demands, and mothers’ experiences of returning to work after childbirth and managing their breastfeeding. The semi-structured nature of the interviews created a conversational, free-flowing, and informal interview style about breastfeeding, while the interviewers could probe, comment, or ask further questions for clarity (DeJonckheere and Vaughn 2019). For example, while the core interview guide included questions central to the research topic—such as “What influenced your decision to breastfeed or not?”—the interviewees were regularly encouraged to reflect on their infant feeding practices (formula, breast milk, cup-feeding, pumping) and explain value systems, cultural beliefs, and health perspectives that shaped feeding habits as an individual and in their community.

The interviews were transcribed into English to create a verbatim transcript, with mothers given pseudonyms. NVivo 12, a QSR software package, was used for data management and storage (Zamawe 2015). Because data collection and data analysis occurred concurrently, we ceased collection once we reached a point of data saturation where no new information was generated (Strauss and Corbin 1998).

We followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-step guide to thematic analysis to explore and interpret participants’ lived experiences. Initially, in step 1, we identified trends and patterns in the data. Subsequently, we created potential codes such as “combining work and foodwork is difficult” or “lack of care for employees’ needs.” Next, interview transcripts were carefully reread to formulate additional codes such as “alter foodwork hours.” This iterative process was repeated until we resolved discrepancies in the coding through discussion and reflection. We then synthesized the coded data to develop key themes that centered the intersections of race, gender, and class in low-income mothers’ foodwork practices. Finally, we reported on these intersectional findings.

We achieved rigor by applying Lincoln and Guba’s (1986) four criteria—credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability—while we established reflexivity by positioning ourselves within the research. We came to recognize that while both authors may share the same race (black), gender (woman), and nationality (South African), our middle-class status meant that we lived in a vastly different social world from our participants, and our daily experiences of oppression and privilege were distinct.

Intersecting Tensions in Low-Income Mothers’ Foodwork: Gender Norms and Class Realities

Mothers in our study shared similar experiences of marginalization, suggesting that their identities as low-income women shaped their breastfeeding and employment experiences. However, their racial identities, based on South Africa’s racialized stratification of differential access to education, resources, and residential areas exposed them to some unique challenges in combining breastfeeding and employment. In apartheid, Black people were relegated to living areas furthest away from the cities in townships without electricity, sanitation, and transport infrastructure, and the poorest-resourced education. Colored people were located in township peripheries only slightly closer to the city with some access to basic infrastructure. Our findings show that the intersecting structures of oppression created by apartheid continue to shape the lives of these women in their employment options and foodwork practices. For example, more precarious and less protected work such as domestic work in private homes was fulfilled by Black mothers. Colored mothers were more likely to work in factory jobs, which provided slightly more stable forms of income and were protected by formalized contracts. Three key themes were identified: (1) the labor of breastfeeding within contexts of low-income earning, (2) gender norms and social class shaping childcare and foodwork, and (3) local knowledges about foodwork and employment.

The Labor of Breastfeeding Within Contexts of Low-Income Earning

Low-income black mothers faced various challenges because of their employment in precarious low-wage work. They worked long hours and were nervous to take lunch or pumping breaks, not wanting to jeopardize their jobs because they felt that they were easily replaceable. Sometimes mothers who wanted to nourish their children by pumping milk at work, and/or pumped because formula milk was too expensive, hid this foodwork labor. The practice of hiding their foodwork created stress and fear. Amahle, a Black female domestic worker, who is 39 years old, shared a common fear among low waged, black women:

I was feeling scared . . . sometimes she [the employer] was promising me she was going to fire me . . . she is complaining . . . so I feel scared . . . when she comes back, when I heard there is a sound for the car outside then I start to run and then take my bottles [of pumped milk out of the fridge] and then . . . I put in my bag.

Workers like Amahle feared that homeowners could fire them, even though their jobs were ostensibly protected. Because of the large populations of workers available, and the significant income disparities, domestic workers face severe job insecurities. Employers, wielding intersecting powers related to their roles, education, and often race, created exploitative conditions that weakened the implementation of labor protective legislation in homes (Masterson and Hoobler 2019). Despite Amahle being entitled to breastfeeding breaks during her workday, she hid her foodwork to nourish her child, to maintain her good worker status. Mothers’ attempts to hide their “leaky” state in the workplace to maintain their good worker status have been discussed by other researchers (Al-Attas and Shaw 2022; Gatrell 2013, 2019). Such hiding, however, is especially difficult for domestic workers in private homes, who can be far more surveilled (Pereira-Kotze et al. 2023).

Many mothers noted the difficulties of pumping in their work context. Zandile, a 42-year-old Black mother, who worked as a cleaner in a tertiary educational institution, shared that while she was able to pump breast milk at work, the space was unsanitary. She said: “We don’t [even] have a place to wash hands.” Zandile felt that pumping was viewed as unacceptable at her workplace and recounted an incident in which her boss saw a bottle of breast milk in the freezer and “freaked out,” saying “I don’t want to see this again”:

It’s like people, they know that you have a baby but then when you . . . express milk, they are not into that “kind of thing” . . . you had to hide actually . . . (laughs) . . . they believed that expressing milk is for white people . . . People don’t want to see breastmilk lying anywhere, it’s like it’s dirty, that’s how they see it like someone just squeezed (it) . . . I think they don’t understand the concept of covering a bottle in a plastic bag, it’s not like it’s gonna affect other foods in the freezer. Maybe they are scared that the hormones will come out and go in their smoothie (laughs).

Zandile’s experience highlights how race and class shape foodwork in the workplace. First, there is an inference that whereas pumping breast milk in the workplace is allowed for white women, black women are not worthy of this same opportunity. Men supervisors and masculine workplace cultures see breast milk in the workplace fridge as a taboo, perhaps because of its association with the female breast that carries a sexual connotation. Or breast milk is seen as dirty because it has come from a female body and is not sterilized milk in bottles from a supermarket. These negative attitudes by managers compel black mothers to conceal their foodwork in the workplace.

In the U.S. context, Acker (2009) also found that breastfeeding outside of the private home space was considered inappropriate. The traditional, masculine workplace culture endorses the ideal worker as distant from their parenting role (Gatrell 2013). Gatrell (2019) added that because pumped breast milk is not something a competent male worker would traditionally be associated with, it threatens the social norms of the workplace.

In the context of high unemployment in South Africa (34.5 percent; Statistics South Africa 2022), many women mentioned the difficulty they experienced finding paid work. The scarcity of job opportunities and fear of losing their jobs meant that some endured physical pain and discomfort as a lactating mother unable to express breast milk during their day. Cezanne, a 27-year-old colored female waitress, shared that “sometimes the breasts become very painful so you need to get it [the milk] out.” Because she did not have opportunities to pump at work, she reduced her intake of liquid to decrease her milk production. Women are willing to succumb to breast and nipple pain during the working day, to distance their gendered foodwork demands from their work responsibilities. Similar to other studies, many low-income mothers chose this distancing as a coping mechanism to deal with the labor-intensive challenges of combining paid work and mothering (Johnson and Salpini 2017; Lee 2018). The “good mother” is expected to persevere with foodwork duties regardless of the fact that they work in unsupportive workspaces that impose inflexible schedules (Hanser and Li 2017). Nonetheless, some women stopped breastfeeding to ensure they could still provide for their families with paid work.

Participants were asked how employers and managers can improve workplace breastfeeding support. Phylis, a 23-year-old colored mother who is a sales assistant, explained that she wanted managers to educate staff on the importance of breastfeeding and in this way “uplift and upskill” both the mothers and their co-workers. The general sentiment of the mothers, however, was that it was their responsibility to innovatively combine breastfeeding and paid work. While they would have appreciated support from their employees, they did not feel they could ask for such support. South African managers typically lack an understanding of breastfeeding in the workplace (Daniels, du Plessis, and Mbhenyane 2020). Scholars have confirmed that educating managers and equipping them with the skills to engage in these discussions would be useful (Mabaso, Jaga, and Doherty 2020). However, employers acting individually, such as in private homes, may not see the need for such investment.

Gender Norms and Social Class Shaping Childcare and Foodwork

The mothers in our study struggled to meet the demands of childcare, traditionally viewed as women’s work and upheld by patriarchy. Many of these mothers were also single heads of households, sometimes supporting extended families, with minimal to no physical or financial support from their children’s fathers. Even when fathers could help with bottle feeding, they were less inclined to do so. Mthobeli, a 45-year-old Black woman who works as a cleaner in a government hospital, shared her frustration around the lack of paternal involvement, attributing this to African cultural norms. When her child was given a bottle of expressed breast milk, refused to take it, and began crying, the father said: “Your child is crying come take [the child] it’s your child.” Mthobeli continued: “you know the African people are so stubborn . . . there are rules for each, like men must do this and women must do that . . . they put the role of taking care of the child on the mother only.” Mthobeli’s frustration with the lack of paternal involvement is emblematic of deeply ingrained societal expectations that place the burden of childcare predominantly on mothers. Her experience reflects the cultural acceptance of gender expectations where men and women have prescribed duties.

Two other mothers stated that the full childcare load along with paid employment was exhausting, making breastfeeding after returning to work challenging. Dolinde, a Black mother and council worker, who opted for formula to ease the challenge of combining breastfeeding and employment, shared that while her child’s father was indifferent to her foodwork choices, once she began formula feeding he complained about the cost. She said,

It’s now my child and my responsibility . . . I feel like a single parent sometimes . . . he (the father) just went with my [feeding] decisions because he didn’t know anything about children . . . all he just said was “maybe you could’ve kept her on the breast, formula is expensive.”

Annika, who is a 24-year-old colored female waitress, shared,

You get exhausted, you must do everything yourself. It’s very hard . . . I had to at night give him breast, then it’s like he is still hungry, I didn’t give him enough . . . then I must stand up and make him a bottle [of formula].

Culturally informed gender dynamics reinforce that foodwork decisions are women’s work. Yet when women in paid work choose foodwork options such as opting for formula feeding to ease their burden, their decisions may be judged by fathers to be bad decisions because such feeding incurs a cost. Breastfeeding is often considered “free,” but the time and mental health costs for mothers, including the exhausting labor of combining it with paid work and the stress of finding suitable places to pump, place significant invisible burdens on low-income working mothers. In low-income contexts, fathers, if involved, also have limited resources to supply formula milk.

Apartheid legacies of Black men migrating for work such as in mines, and leaving their families behind, contributed to the persistent low involvement of or abandonment by Black fathers (Spjeldnaes 2021). Black women household heads are thus at greater risk of poverty (Flatø, Muttarak, and Pelser 2017). As women-headed households in South Africa are on the rise (42 percent, Statista 2023), many black low-income mothers struggle to combine employment with childcare. Both tasks are deeply necessary to sustain their families. In South Africa, only 34 percent of children live with both parents (Hall 2023). Most Black children receive care from either their biological mother or other women relatives such as grandmothers (Hatch and Posel 2018). Family is understood as a clan/kin network, extending beyond the nuclear family unit to encompass multi-generational relationships and care networks (van Breda and Pinkerton 2020). Women in their homes or neighborhoods typically provide informal childcare services, creating temporary employment opportunities within neighborhoods. Children were also cared for by grandmothers in distant provinces. Although there were some instances in our sample of involved fathers and an uncle who encouraged his nephew to provide childcare, these experiences were rare. Mthobeli remarked,

When I gave birth to the boy, his uncle came to the house and said (to my husband) . . . “You must wash nappies, because my boy, we used to buy the diapers . . . we used to wash them” . . . They (the young fathers) listen to the elders . . . he [the uncle[ said, “No, don’t just dump the responsibility to her.”

Systemic shifts in sociocultural norms around childcare responsibilities are needed to sustainably support breastfeeding working mothers. Studies show that partner emotional and instrumental support is a key enabler for working mothers to combine breastfeeding and employment (Ratnasari et al. 2017).

Duduzile, a 29-year-old Black sales agent, spoke of the importance of dismantling traditional gendered norms that center motherhood as women’s primary, and sometimes only, identity. Rather, she wished to be recognized for a myriad of intersecting identities that explain her, and other women’s lives. She said,

The moment you have the mother in front of your name it becomes your title . . . But mother is one aspect of my life, it’s not what makes me who I am. It contributes towards my drive 150 percent, it contributes towards the fact that I can’t give up, and the fact that I have to keep going, but it’s not all of me. So the label that comes with that is a major issue . . . when you are a single mom, they just see you as you are just the mom.

When asked further about her experience of breastfeeding, she noted: “I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t know why they say it’s a bonding experience. It’s torturous and painful, it’s sleep-depriving, it’s just crazy . . . your boobs get engorged, it’s so sore.” Under the tenets of intensive mothering, a mother is expected to be child-centric and an emotionally absorbing expert, deeply engaged and invested in their children’s lives (Hays 1996). However, these ideals are unrealistic and even undesirable for many low-income mothers like Duduzile, who are focusing on surviving as single mothers. In some contexts, white, class-privileged mothers may enjoy their social identities being centered around motherhood, including meeting ideal standards of breastfeeding (Avishai 2007), but in the South African context, black low-income women are confronted daily with structural oppressions and poverty.

In our study, mothers embraced alternative perceptions of mothering. One such alternative was integrated motherhood (Dow 2016), which recognizes that mothers can rely on kin and community members as child caregivers, which then enables them to pursue employment opportunities for their livelihood. Some mothers adopted what might be called a motherwork perspective, where women shared knowledge and experiences to enrich learning and understanding of motherhood within the context of economic inequality and marginalization (Collins 1994). The mothers we spoke with acknowledged child-rearing within the context of economic inequality and marginalization, and also within a broader community beyond the nuclear family setting.

Local Knowledge and Foodwork, and Employment

Most of the women we spoke with were unable to exclusively breastfeed their babies for 6 months, as endorsed by the World Health Organization (2017). Such global goals are based on limited consideration of the diverse socioeconomic and cultural contexts of women, and inadvertently pathologized mothers’ foodwork knowledge and efforts. Many mothers in our study supplemented their breast milk with formula as a way to manage their return to work, knowing that pumping in the workplace would be challenging or impossible. Most women were guided by experienced family members, relying on cues such as crying to determine infant satisfaction. Hlengiwe, a 25-year-old Black female waitress, breastfed during the day, but switched to formula when her child cried at night: “Sometimes she is crying because she is hungry then I start to apply the . . . bottles (formula).” Some mothers used formula to ensure their child slept through the night, so that they could rest after having worked a long and hard day. Mothers who lived in townships often had to leave home at 5 a.m. for a lengthy and complex commute, returning 12 to 14 hours later. As Lerato, a 23-year-old Black female sales assistant, explained,

I live in Khayelitsha . . . it’s so far (to bring my child) and take them back home with me, at that time also so late . . . Rich people who have cars and [who] are not working far from their work . . . For this type of job [the low-wage job that she has] . . . it is not possible.

Feminist critiques recognize that women must have autonomy over their feeding choices and acknowledge that women opt for practices that are most appropriate for their needs (Alburo-Caeñte 2014; McCarter-Spaulding 2008). Despite facing time-intensive work and commutes and the sociomaterial realities of poverty in black communities, low-income mothers like Hlengiwe adeptly manage both the technical aspects of their foodwork tasks and the nurturing elements of mothering, harmonizing with their infants’ feeding needs.

Maponya, Janse van Rensburg, and Du Plessis-Faurie (2021) found that South African mothers turned to mixed feeding because it was a practice in African traditions often passed down from their mothers, grandmothers, and other women folk. In our study, mixed feeding was common among working women who had their own mothers or grandmothers take care of their children. Young mothers were encouraged to return to work, often because they were the sole breadwinners in a family of other women. Having raised their own children, these older mothers and grandmothers believed in mixed feeding so that the younger mothers could return to earn a living. Geraldine, a colored 26-year-old who worked as a cashier at a large food retailer, said,

I have a mother who is very old school . . . she would give my child food from 3 months. She would give like a scoop, two scoops of porridge, one yoghurt per day . . . by the age of five months she would give solid food from the pot. My mother would say “the child is hungry . . . I will feed the child now.”

Geraldine relied on generational knowledge to combine foodwork with paid employment.

Health literature often criticizes foodwork knowledges that deviate from global health guidelines on optimal infant feeding practices; however, cultural practices passed down generations on raising children are critical forms of alternative knowledge. A few mothers claimed to be exclusively breastfeeding, but when further probed they shared that they gave their babies water because it was a well-established practice in their communities and culturally accepted, and they did not believe that it constituted mixed feeding. Studies show that health guidelines on exclusive breastfeeding tend to clash with black low-income community beliefs on giving gripe water to soothe colic (Jewett, Pilime, and Richter 2022; Trafford et al. 2020).

Indeed, some mothers introduced water into their infants’ diets, following traditional beliefs that water has healing properties such as reducing the infant’s pimples that came from breast milk and for preventing colic. Quaanita, who is a 29-year-old colored machinist in a garment factory explained,

From the first month, you must give your child water . . . you must obviously boil the water, and throw like a little bit of gripe water. The water cleanses the child from inside . . . they [the infant] would get like this pink pimples [from breastmilk].

The mothers we spoke with often followed the advice of their mothers and grandmothers, who contradicted healthcare workers’ recommendations. Philisiwe, a 34-year-old Black packer in a garment factory, also noted: “My aunt she say sometimes don’t listen to them [healthcare workers] because they . . . say it’s [exclusive breastfeeding] a must.” Likewise, Rowena, age unknown, a colored presser in a garment factory, acknowledged: “[the] clinic they tell us don’t give any water with medicine in or so. But you know mos us people [give] little water.” Younger mothers, who found colicky babies stressful to manage after returning from a long day’s work, especially relied on recommendations from their maternal family members even when they knew that it contrasted with the knowledge they received from health workers.

Mothers like Quaanita, Rowina, and Philisiwe employed a range of foodwork practices to care for their infants based on guidance from their maternal elders, and their own beliefs of what is best for their children. Global guidelines seem to be developed in one context, most often resourced countries with Western values and middle-class norms, and are assumed to be universal. However, such expectations often are unrealistic for high-poverty, low-resourced communities with different cultural traditions. In our study, the mothers are aware of the ideal of 6 months exclusive breastfeeding but find it close to impossible for working mothers with only partially paid 4-month maternity leave, along with a lack of basic healthcare and support for lactating mothers in low-wage jobs. The neighborhoods in which they reside are far from work, adding to time spent away from their infants. Moreover, workplaces are hostile to their foodwork as new mothers; and fathers are absent or not supportive in infant foodwork strategies. Thus, many mothers could not meet the World Health Organization’s 6-month exclusive breastfeeding recommendation, because it overlooked diverse socioeconomic and cultural contexts, inadvertently undermining mothers’ foodwork knowledge and efforts.

Conclusion and Recommendations

This study contributes to intersectional theorizing on breastfeeding as a particular form of foodwork in the workplace, demonstrating how race, gender, and class shape this form of foodwork among black low-income mothers in Cape Town, South Africa. Colonial and apartheid histories in South Africa have created and perpetuated structural inequalities, which exacerbate the challenges that many black new mothers face in feeding their infants. Despite legislated breaks, persistent masculine workplace cultures maintain breastfeeding as a taboo topic in the workplace. This culture, coupled with a high unemployment rate in South Africa and the easy availability of low-wage workers, means that low-income mothers are less likely to voice their rights to breastfeeding breaks for fear of losing their jobs. For several mothers, it was easier to cease breastfeeding before returning to work, to avoid these pressures. In addition, outside work our participants had little support. Their lack of financial resources to pay for lactation expertise or outsource help, and the general absence of a partner in many single woman–headed households, create specific barriers for low-income mothers who wish to combine breastfeeding and employment.

Black low-income women, however, are not merely victims of colonial and apartheid-based oppressions and poverty, but are also agents capable of creative and innovative foodwork practices built through community and local knowledges passed down from their own mothers and grandmothers. Kin networks of care shared by mothers and grandmothers and foodwork practices passed down generationally allow some black low-income mothers to return to paid employment. Their foodwork practices may appear incongruent with the health discourse of exclusive breastfeeding promoted by international agencies, but our findings highlight that breastfeeding as a form of foodwork is strongly shaped by sociocultural practices and material realities, with the simultaneous desire of the mothers to be economically active.

Managerial and Social Policy Implications

Returning to work is cited as a key reason for the cessation of breastfeeding among the low-income mothers in many parts of the world (Siziba et al. 2015). Supporting breastfeeding and pumping as a form of foodwork in the workplace has benefits for mothers, infants, employers, and society (Al-Attas and Shaw 2022; Walters, Phan, and Mathisen 2019). Supportive policies and practices could help shift narratives on organizational and societal support, encouraging and actively supporting breastfeeding, thereby altering dominant masculine organizational norms to become more enabling for working women (Gatrell 2019).

For larger organizations that employ low-income women, cost-effective managerial strategies could be implemented to support workplace breastfeeding. Gender-sensitive training can provide workers and managers with the skills needed in mixed-gender workplaces, including sensitizing persons to the needs for mothers who want to combine breastfeeding with paid work (Daniels, du Plessis, and Mbhenyane 2020; Mabaso, Jaga, and Doherty 2020; Vilar-Compte et al. 2021). Such training could also remove the onus from mothers who have to educate their co-workers and employers on mother-friendly policies (Bradford et al. 2017).

Whereas breast pumps were considered expensive for some mothers, other interviewees communicated that they were taught to hand express and were doing so in toilets merely to relieve their full breasts. Organizational support for mothers who need to express breast milk could go a long way in making mothers feel supported. A private space for mothers, with access to milk storage options, would prevent them from having to breastfeed or pump milk in unsafe or unhygienic spaces such as bathrooms or to experience sore breasts from not expressing during their workday.

Given that employment is a major barrier to breastfeeding, organizations that implement workplace breastfeeding support initiatives can influence foodwork at a societal level, by supporting higher breast milk feeding rates. Consequently, organizations would be promoting food security for young children in low-income communities, reducing malnutrition, and improving upward mobility through the guaranteed food supply of breast milk to working mothers’ infants (Salmon 2015). Such organizational supports make it easier for low-income mothers to engage in or remain economically activity, thereby fostering gender equity. Failing to support breastfeeding in the workplace creates tangible costs, contributing to preventable illness, exacerbated gender inequalities, and substantial economic losses (Walters, Phan, and Mathisen 2019). The creation of supportive policies, however, necessitates the collaboration of a diverse range of stakeholders, including policy makers, businesses, women’s rights groups, and breastfeeding mothers themselves.

For breastfeeding in private homes and smaller workplaces, where oversight of policy implementation is more challenging, efforts to improve breastfeeding policy awareness among the public and focusing on enforcement mechanisms are key. Collective engagement among policy makers, unions, employers, civil society, activist groups, and employees can help identify barriers to current implementation of supporting breastfeeding among domestic workers and low-income workers in small organizations, upon which more context-nuanced implementation strategies can be developed for different stakeholder groups (Denman 2012).

In this article, we extend theoretical understanding of black, low-income mothers breastfeeding as foodwork in the workplace. By employing an intersectional lens recognizing breastfeeding as complex maternal labor, we expand current research. We offer an empirical contribution to the field by challenging prevailing assumptions about the experiences of working mothers, highlighting the material realities and differential outcomes faced by low-income black women in South Africa influenced by histories of colonialism and apartheid. Our study underscores not only the struggles but also the innovative foodwork solutions devised by these mothers to facilitate breastfeeding and employment, thus advancing efforts to improve breastfeeding accessibility and support in the workplace.

Our work suggests that more research on the topic of breastfeeding as foodwork is required. Especially needed are longitudinal qualitative studies to gather insight into how black low-income women navigate paid work during pregnancy, maternity leave, and their eventual return to work. This approach would allow researchers to track organizational support for pregnant and lactating women, and to track mothers’ foodwork choices over pregnancy in the postnatal period to promote foodwork more effectively.