Conceiving the Nation: The "Politics of the Womb" in Kenya, the United States, Greece, and Ireland

Abstract

Alexandra Halkias. The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xv + 413 pp. ill. ISBN 0-8223-3311-2 (cl); 0-8223-3323-6 (pb). Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer. Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920–1940. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. xxii + 296 pp. ISBN 0-8142-0954-8 (cl). Jennifer E. Spreng. Abortion and Divorce Law in Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. ix + 259 pp. ISBN 0-7864-1675-0 (pb). Lynn M. Thomas. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiii + 300 pp.; maps. ISBN 0-520-22450-7 (cl); 0-520-23540-1 (pb). Feminist scholars and activists alike have long been attentive to the shape and effects of the modern nation-state's interests in women's reproductive behavior. Across disciplines and in many different struggles they have demonstrated that nationalist ideologies as well as material processes of state formation depend fundamentally on elites' ability to control which citizens have how many babies and whether they have them or will be allowed to prevent themselves from having them. These four books offer quite different but ultimately complementary perspectives on what Lynn Thomas so aptly calls the "politics of the womb." Together they enrich our cross-national understanding of the gendered nature of the nation-state as well as of women's often contradictory responses to state formation and legitimation. Lynn Thomas gives us a fascinating and rich analysis of what she calls the "entanglement" of precolonial gender, sexual, and reproductive relations with colonial attempts to "reform" family law in the Meru region of twentieth-century British Kenya. Despite the colonial state's intended strategy of ruling Africans indirectly by reforming and shoring up customary systems of local rule in the rural areas not settled by white farmers, its agents intervened regularly in those systems when colonial interests changed. In [End Page 151] turn, new definitions of Meru tradition reconstructed women's practices, although often not in the ways state actors, their African collaborators, or newly marginalized traditional elites intended. Unrestricted access to a plentiful supply of cheap black labor was the colonizers' top priority, particularly in settler colonies such as Kenya. Paradoxically, however, colonization indirectly decreased Meru birth rates; the destruction of precolonial economic structures forced newly impoverished families to delay marriages—and the clitoral excision ceremonies that made Meru girls marriageable—until young men could pay bride wealth. Delayed marriage meant more premarital sex and, predictably, more out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Because Meru men would not pay to marry unexcised mothers, young women used abortion and infanticide to protect their chances of marriage. Rather than address the economic crisis underlying the declining numbers of Meru laborers, British officials used their interpretations of customary law to encourage the Meru to legitimate rather than terminate out-of-wedlock pregnancies. In their attempts to reduce bridewealth costs, sever the connection between female genital excision and marriage, and punish fathers who refused to marry the women they impregnated, colonial officials and their African collaborators created a local government in Meru. British transformations-cum-codifications of customary law and the actual court cases to which they gave rise—all done in the struggle to control African wombs—tied rural families, economies, and ideologies to the larger project of state formation in Kenya. Thomas's oral histories of Meru women and men born before Kenyan independence combined with her close reading of paternity cases brought to the tribal courts effectively demonstrate that African women both resisted and embraced interventions in marital, sexual, and reproductive relations. Meru girls fought off attempts by local agents of the state and male elders alike to stop excision; as clitoral surgeries went underground, they became more dangerous but neither less frequent nor...