Listening to Women's Voices: The Retrieval and Construction of African Women's History

Abstract

Listening to Women's Voices: The Retrieval and Construction of African Women's History Luise White. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. xiv + 285 pp.; maps. ISBN 0-226-90506-8 (cl); 0-226-89507-6 (pb); $34.95 (cl); $14.95 (pb). Catherine Coles and Beverly Mack, eds. Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. xii + 297 pp.; ill.; map; glossary. ISBN 0-299-13020-7 (cl); 0-299-13024-X (pb); $49.50 (cl); $19.95 (pb). Belinda Bozzoli, with the assistance of Mmantho Nkotsoe. Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900-1983. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann Educational Books; London: James Currey, 1991. xii + 292 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-435-08054-7 (Heinemann, cl); 0-435-08056-3 (Heinemann, pb); $45.00 (Heinemann, cl); $19.95 (Heinemann, pb). Jane L. Parpart The three books under review reflect many of the current trends in the study of African women's history. AU three are concerned with retrieving the voices and experiences of a largely silenced group—African women—and aU three, espedaUy White and BozzoU, use a number of new approaches to achieve this goal. Research and writing on African women have evolved rapidly over the last twenty years. Largely the preserve of anthropologists and missionaries irdtiaUy, African women's history came into its own in 1976 with the pubUcation of a landmark coUection, Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay.1 This coUection sought to correct the prevalent assumptions of western scholars and colonial commentators who had represented African women as traditionalists, tied to the private sphere, with Uttle interest in economic or poUtical matters. Women in Africa exploded these myths, revealing them for what they were—western gender stereotypes that reduced African women to wives and mothers, completely ignoring their crucial role in economic and poUtical activities. In the book women emerge as entrepreneurs and producers , reUgious leaders and community activists. While the influence of © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) 172 Journal of Women's History Fall patriarchy, or male domination, is acknowledged, women's capadty to influence events and to protect their interests outside the home could no longer be ignored. Most early scholarship on African women emphasized women's economic and poUtical activities. Drawing on the liberal tradition of feminist studies emerging in the West, and the growing concern with women's development, these early studies focused on issues of equity, particularly women's access to education, employment, and political power. A reformist approach, with its beUef in rational poUcy reform, underlay much of this work. The articles in Edna Bay's Women and Work in Africa, for example, chronicled the double day of most African women, with their heavy productive and reproductive duties, and caUed for African women to take part in the process of modernization.2 A more dired preoccupation with African women's relation to the state, legal structures, and poUtics inspired some important writings as weU. Jean Hay's and Marda Wright's collection , African Women and the Law, explored the way African women coped with poUtical and legal structures, both in precolonial African sodeties and during the maelstrom of colonial change.3 Influenced by the dependency school and Marxist- and socialist-feminist scholarship, some scholars sought answers to African women's subordination in patriarchal and class structures.4 Claire Robertson's and Iris Berger's landmark study, Women and Class in Africa, extended the analysis of women's economic activities to recognize the importance of class on African women's Uves and opportunities, both in colonial and postcolonial societies. A Marxist political-economy approach to feminist analysis, with its emphasis on class and patriarchy, inspired Sharon Stichter's and my edited coUection, Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and the Workforce. A focus on poUtical economy and the gendered nature of the state also informed the articles in Women and the State in Africa, which, whUe recognizing male domination of state structures, adopts a rather diffuse definition of politics and power in order to understand...