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"Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa
Edited by Dorothy L. Hodgson, Rutgers University, Sheryl A. McCurdy, University of Texas, HoustonHeinemann / ISBN 0-325-07004-0 / 978-0-325-07004-9 / 2001 / 344 pp / paperback
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The articles in this wonderful collection demonstrate yet again how wise it can be for women to be "wicked" and in small and large ways change their worlds. In documenting these women, through space, place, and time, and station, Hodgson and McCurdy offer a strategic analytical category through which to shift paradigms of gender analysis in Africa.
--Abena Busia, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Rutgers University The articles in this wonderful collection demonstrate yet again how wise it can be for women to be "wicked" and in small and large ways change their worlds. In documenting these women, through space, place, and time, and station, Hodgson and McCurdy offer a strategic analytical category through which to shift paradigms of gender analysis in Africa.
—Abena Busia, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Rutgers University This edited collection of 17 essays examines the many ways African women pushed the borders individually and collectively, of "acceptable" behavior to produce changes in the gendered dynamics of power and a reconfiguration of broader moral and social orders. The book bridges the gap between studies of women and studies of gender by demonstrating how gender relations are produced, reproduced, and transformed through the everyday ideas and agency of women and men interacting with local and translocal structures and processes. With rich attention to the interplay between agency, power, and structure, this superb collection challenges common stereotypes of African women as either victims or unrestrained resisters.
Hodgson and McCurdy have assembled an impressive and multidisciplinary group of contributors. Some are senior scholars who have published widely in social history. Others are junior or mid-ranking scholars who already have substantial and have publications in the leading journals in their fields. The editors themselves provide a superb introduction that unifies the collection and offers novel theoretical and methodological insights into the study of women in Africa. This is a long overdue anthology that should become a required text every course that explores the experiences of African women and in every African Studies and African history course that takes gender seriously. |
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Table of Contents
Contents:
Preface
Introduction: "Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa, Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy
Contesting Conjugality; Women, Marriage, Divorce and the Emerging Colonial State in Abeokuta (Nigeria) 1892-1904, Judith Byfield
"She Thinks She's Like a Man": Marriage and (De)construction Gender Identity in Colonial Buha, Western
Tanzania, 1943-1960, Margot Lovett
Wayward Women and Useless Men: Contest and Change in Gender Relations in Ado-Odo, S.W. Nigeria, Andrea Cornwall
"Gone to Their Second Husbands": Marital Metaphors and Conjugal Contracts in the Gambia's
Female Garden Sector, Richard A. Schroeder
Confronting Authority; Dancing Women and Colonial Men: The Nwaobiala of 1925, Misty L. Bastian
Rounding up Spinisters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante, Jean Allman
"My Daughter Belongs to the Government Now": Marriage, Maasai, and the Tanzania State, Dorothy L. Hodgson
Taking Spaces/Making Spaces; Gender and the Cultural Construction of "Bad Women" in the Development of Kampala-Kibuga, 1900-1962, Nakanyike B. Musisi
You Have Left Me Wandering About: Basotho Women and the Culture of Mobility, David B. Coplan
Urban Threats: Manyema Women, Low Fertility, and Venereal Diseases in British Colonial Tanganyika, 1926-36, Sheryl A. McCurdy
Negotiating Social Independence: The Challenges of
Career Pursuits for Igbo Women in Post Colonial Nigeria, Philomena E. Okeke
Negotiating Difference; The Politics of Difference and Women's Associations in Niger: Of "Prostitutes," the Public, and Politics, Barbara M. Cooper
"Wicked Women" and "Respectable Ladies": Reconfiguring Gender on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1936-1964, Jane L. Parpart
Gender and Profiteering: Ghana's Market Women as Devoted Mothers and "Human Vampire Bats", Gracia Clark
Index
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