Whose Home Was Safe? | Prof Amanda Gouws on Women, Lockdown and COVID Diaries
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August was Women's Month, with its annual invitation to reflect on equality, care, work, safety and belonging. On SiyakhulaLive, that reflection turns backwards – to a time not so long ago when COVID-19 turned everything upside down, and to the question of what that moment looked like through the eyes and experiences of women. In this episode, recorded on 2 September 2026, the conversation moves from the ordinary disruptions everyone remembers to the inequalities the pandemic exposed and, in many cases, deepened.
Prof Amanda Gouws, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and SARChI Chair in Gender Politics at Stellenbosch University, joins Dr Katlego Letlonkane on SiyakhulaLive to unpack what happened to women when the world was told to stay home. With Olivia Ezeobi of the Department of Economics, she co-edited COVID Diaries: Women's Experiences of the Pandemic, a collection of essays written by women while the crisis was still unfolding around them.
Gouws brings the perspective of a scholar who has spent decades on women and citizenship, women's representation and gender-based violence, and who served as a Commissioner with the Commission for Gender Equality. Her argument is that the pandemic did not create the inequalities it revealed. It stripped away the arrangements that had been keeping unpaid care work, unequal households and unsafe homes comfortably out of view – and then asked women to absorb the shock on everyone else's behalf.
The conversation begins with what happened when work moved into the home, turns to care responsibilities that intensified with no corresponding relief, confronts the escalation of domestic violence behind closed doors, and closes on why it mattered to record these experiences in women's own voices rather than in statistics alone.
What we cover in this episode:
- When "stay home" meant different things: Gouws takes apart the instruction that defined the lockdown, arguing that its meaning depended entirely on who you lived with, how much unpaid work was already waiting for you, and whether home was a refuge or a risk.
- The office, the classroom and the kitchen, all at once: she describes what the collapse of the boundary between paid work and household labour actually cost women, and why the consequences for their careers outlasted the restrictions themselves.
- A burden that expanded and never contracted: with crèches shut, schools closed and relatives ill or isolating, care work multiplied – almost none of it counted, paid or shared. Gouws asks what it says about a society that its unpaid care infrastructure is the shock absorber of first resort.
- The danger was inside: she places the escalation of domestic and intimate partner violence under lockdown within South Africa's broader record on gender-based violence, and asks why a state response built around staying home treated safety at home as a given.
- An archive in women's own voices: Gouws explains the editorial choice behind COVID Diaries – contributions from researchers at Stellenbosch and other institutions alongside women in the corporate and NGO sectors, organised across five sections from "The Political is Personal" to "The Body on the Front Line". Giving voice, she argues, is a feminist principle, because women's accounts are so often silenced or reduced to data.
- What the diaries still tell us: the book was written as history while it was still being lived. Closing the conversation, Gouws reflects on what those accounts continue to reveal about whose labour counts, and how little has structurally shifted since.
Stream MFM 92.6: www.mfm.co.za
Follow us on socials: @mfm926
Prof Amanda Gouws, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and SARChI Chair in Gender Politics at Stellenbosch University, joins Dr Katlego Letlonkane on SiyakhulaLive to unpack what happened to women when the world was told to stay home. With Olivia Ezeobi of the Department of Economics, she co-edited COVID Diaries: Women's Experiences of the Pandemic, a collection of essays written by women while the crisis was still unfolding around them.
Gouws brings the perspective of a scholar who has spent decades on women and citizenship, women's representation and gender-based violence, and who served as a Commissioner with the Commission for Gender Equality. Her argument is that the pandemic did not create the inequalities it revealed. It stripped away the arrangements that had been keeping unpaid care work, unequal households and unsafe homes comfortably out of view – and then asked women to absorb the shock on everyone else's behalf.
The conversation begins with what happened when work moved into the home, turns to care responsibilities that intensified with no corresponding relief, confronts the escalation of domestic violence behind closed doors, and closes on why it mattered to record these experiences in women's own voices rather than in statistics alone.
What we cover in this episode:
- When "stay home" meant different things: Gouws takes apart the instruction that defined the lockdown, arguing that its meaning depended entirely on who you lived with, how much unpaid work was already waiting for you, and whether home was a refuge or a risk.
- The office, the classroom and the kitchen, all at once: she describes what the collapse of the boundary between paid work and household labour actually cost women, and why the consequences for their careers outlasted the restrictions themselves.
- A burden that expanded and never contracted: with crèches shut, schools closed and relatives ill or isolating, care work multiplied – almost none of it counted, paid or shared. Gouws asks what it says about a society that its unpaid care infrastructure is the shock absorber of first resort.
- The danger was inside: she places the escalation of domestic and intimate partner violence under lockdown within South Africa's broader record on gender-based violence, and asks why a state response built around staying home treated safety at home as a given.
- An archive in women's own voices: Gouws explains the editorial choice behind COVID Diaries – contributions from researchers at Stellenbosch and other institutions alongside women in the corporate and NGO sectors, organised across five sections from "The Political is Personal" to "The Body on the Front Line". Giving voice, she argues, is a feminist principle, because women's accounts are so often silenced or reduced to data.
- What the diaries still tell us: the book was written as history while it was still being lived. Closing the conversation, Gouws reflects on what those accounts continue to reveal about whose labour counts, and how little has structurally shifted since.
Stream MFM 92.6: www.mfm.co.za
Follow us on socials: @mfm926
