title: 'Behaving well': the transition to respectable womanhood in rural South Africa.
abstract: Few studies of the transition to adulthood in Africa analyse young people's own definitions of the events that confer adult status, and how adulthood is actually attained. This paper examines the experience of transitioning to womanhood in rural Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, drawing on interviews with 18 women aged 18-39. Three primary experiences characterised this transition: puberty and emerging body awareness, spending time with boys, and having a child. More important than the timing of these experiences, however, was whether women 'behaved well' and maintained respectability as they transitioned to adulthood. Behavioural standards reinforcing ideal femininity were focused on dress, manner and talk, and were particularly stringent for mothers. Findings emphasise the value of emic models of adulthood for understanding how youth experience this transition and provide an important counter-narrative to the literature focused primarily on the risk African youth face during this period of change in the life course.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Sociology , Purdue University , West Lafayette , IN , USA.|b MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt), School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences , University of the Witwatersrand , Johannesburg , South Africa.
authors.forename: Christie
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3760-6271
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sennott
authors.affiliation: c Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science , University of Colorado Boulder , Boulder , CO , USA.
authors.forename: Sanyu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: A Mojola
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005260:Female; D057227:Femininity; D019513:Feminism; D006801:Humans; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology*; D012424:Rural Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D066262:Social Norms; D012938:Social Perception; D013019:South Africa; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: South Africa; sexual development; transition to adulthood; womanhood; young women