The HIV/AIDS epidemic has caused the deaths of tens of millions of young adults in sub-Saharan Africa, re-shaping families and whole communities. One major consequence is that older women who have lost their adult children to HIV are now the primary caregivers for their grandchildren.
In response, older women across Africa have organized to support one another and undertake income-generating projects. In 2006, the Stephen Lewis Foundation – a Toronto-based international HIV/AIDS donor organization – launched their influential Grandmothers-to-Grandmothers Campaign to support these women and their projects. The campaign motivated thousands of older women in Canada to organize groups to raise funds and awareness in acts of international grandmotherly solidarity.
In her excellent new book, The Grandmothers’ Movement: Solidarity and Survival in the Time of AIDS, May Chazan explores the remarkable story of these parallel mobilizations of older women in South Africa and Canada, and the role and influence of the Stephen Lewis Foundation in both settings.
Chazan assigns the success of the Grandmothers Campaign in Canada to a particular socio-political climate in a society with increasing numbers of older women who are healthy, educated, and socially conscious. In particular, she argues that the campaign has resonated with many Canadian baby boomers who grew up with the second-wave feminist ideals of a global “sisterhood” during the 1960s–1970s. In South Africa, much of the organizing was motivated by more practical concerns, with older women – as the primary breadwinners in their families – coming together to form income-generating initiatives and cooperatives.
As Canada Research Chair in Gender and Feminist Studies at Trent University, Canada, and a research associate with the Health Economics and AIDS Research Division (HEARD) at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, Chazan is well-positioned to examine the many complex issues at the intersections of aging, HIV/AIDS, feminism, postcolonialism, and international development. The result is that Grandmothers’ Movement is an eminently readable academic monograph. The book’s first section effectively introduces each of these themes and describes how they will be approached. With methods including observation, interviews, focus groups, and photo essays, Chazan focuses subsequent sections on the Grandmothers Campaign, South African older women, Canadian older women, and trans-national connections. Thorough footnotes and a detailed appendix add to the text’s usefulness and enjoyment.
The project that would become The Grandmothers’ Movement began with Chazan’s graduate fieldwork. As she describes, she originally set out to focus on other aspects of South Africa’s HIV epidemic before becoming fascinated by the mobilization of older women. Her academic roots in HIV research are evident throughout the project, which was based on the principles of participatory action research. Chazan was invited to study older women’s groups by two South African nurses who participated in and led some of the groups. The nurses would go on to act as project co-investigators.
The participatory action approach is widely employed in HIV research, as people living with HIV act as peer researchers and co-investigators on research grants and steering committees but so far is underused in gerontology (Blair & Minkler, Reference Blair and Minkler2009). Chazan sees these mobilizations as concrete examples of older women exploding sexist and ageist assumptions about passivity and frailty, and the perspectives and contributions of her participant/co-investigators clearly shape this interpretation. Although the scope of the book eventually grew beyond the direct involvement of the study’s participant/co-investigators, Chazan’s efforts to keep her analysis informed by participatory action throughout are admirable.
A major contribution of The Grandmothers’ Movement is Chazan’s examination of the many meanings and uses of “grandmotherhood” in Canadian and South African settings, as well as in the international development community. At the heart of the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers Campaign is a narrative that Africa’s grandmothers face novel and unprecedented demands in having to care for their grandchildren because they lost their adult children to HIV/AIDS. This idea motivated large numbers of older women in Canada to mobilize to support their African counterparts, whom they viewed as unfairly burdened by new childrearing responsibilities in older age.
In recognizing the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s good work, Chazan carefully argues that this narrative – that Africa’s grandmothers serving as primary caregivers for their grandchildren represents a novel and unprecedented circumstance – did not honestly reflect the lives of older South African women. Chazan’s study participants describe the loss of their adult children to HIV as simply another factor contributing to the adversity that older women in their communities have faced since apartheid. Many did not identify HIV as the primary cause of their hardship but, rather, the associated influences of poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and violence. They describe grandmothers raising grandchildren as a long-standing expectation in their communities, as young adults left to find work in cities. Indeed, many of the South African groups did not even identify as “grandmothers” groups until they became aware of specific funding opportunities from the Stephen Lewis Foundation.
Overall, this is a thoroughly researched and thoughtfully written book, and an important contribution to literature on HIV/AIDS, feminism, international development, and gerontology. Scholars and students interested in any of these topics, and particularly in cross-cultural gerontology, will benefit. The Grandmothers’ Movement serves as a welcome invitation to consider the power of older adults mobilizing for social change.
