'Here Men Are Becoming Women and Women Men'. Gender, Class and Space in Maputo, Mozambique
Outlining historical and contemporary processes of political and economic change in Mozambique’s capital city Maputo, and juxtaposing these with an ethnography of social positons and human agency, this chapter shows that women have conquered new social spaces by exploiting structural conjunctures and by establishing integrative networks, mainly with other women. With the continued male supremacy in private domestic space, women acquiring social positions of basic economic and social independence from men—by becoming de jure or de facto heads of households—are in the best position to take advantage of the city’s opportunities. For the first time in urban Africa, female-headed households have been recorded as having a lower poverty rate than male-headed households.
