Patriarchy and Women's Land Ownership in South Africa

Constitutional equality and post-apartheid land reform aimed to expand access to land and strengthen tenure security in South Africa, yet women's land ownership remains limited. This chapter conducts a guided Comprehensive Literature Review that synthesizes evidence on how patriarchy and property-rights institutions create gendered barriers to land ownership across customary and statutory systems. Two persistent gaps structure the analysis. The first concerns why legal protections and policy commitments often fail during implementation, including where processes break down and which actors and institutions reproduce exclusion. The second concerns the mechanisms through which patriarchal norms are converted into practical barriers in inheritance, marriage, land administration, municipal allocation, dispute resolution, and access to finance. The chapter maps evidence across key institutions and links constrained land rights to outcomes such as titling, credit access, enterprise development, productivity, and asset accumulation.