From Empowerment to Emancipation: Women Entrepreneurship Cooking up a Stir in South Africa: Women’s Entrepreneurship & Culture

Women’s entrepreneurship research highlights the need to understand contextualised gender norms, stereotypes and expectations of women and their roles in society when analysing women’s entrepreneurial journeys. Acknowledging the role of entrepreneurship for economic development and the importance of women entrepreneurship in African countries,, this paper presents entrepreneurship as a socio-economic dilemma in the context of the traditional role of women in African societies, while situating the study at the interface between women entrepreneurship, economic empowerment and emancipation literature. For this study, we adopt an interpretative phenomenological approach, analysing 152 accounts of South African women entrepreneurs, while extending the conceptualisations of emancipation by Rindova et al. (2009); Verduijn et al. (2014) and Laclau (1996). Key findings indicate the importance of non-economic factors, specifically notions of autonomy and freedom driving women’s entrepreneurship, both as motivation and as a perceived achievement.