Men go around making kids and “don't even care”: gender, parenting and social protection in northeastern Brazil

Abstract

Considering gender, conjugality, parenthood and social protection policies as an articulated whole, the study aims at understanding how the day-to-day life of lower class women from the neighbourhood of Ponta Negra, in Natal-RN, Brazil, are permeated by a cumulative series of constraints and responsibilities. Gathered during an ethnographic field study, especially through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the empirical elements show that the dominant gender values and the matrifocality that they originate force many women to assume, almost exclusively, the roles of economic, educational and affective providers for their children, generating situations of vulnerability which demand the existence of social protection devices, which, paradoxically, tend to burden them even more and reinforce gender asymmetries.