Women in Twentieth-Century Africa
New Approaches to African History Series

During a turbulent colonial and postcolonial century, African women struggled to control their own marital, sexual and economic lives and to gain a significant voice in local and national politics. This book introduces many remarkable women, who organized religious and political movements, fought in anti-colonial wars, ran away to escape arranged marriages, and during the 1990s began successful campaigns for gender parity in national legislatures. The book also explores the apparent paradox in the conflicting images of African women - as singularly oppressed and dominated by men, but also as strong, resourceful, and willing to challenge governments and local traditions to protect themselves and their families. Understanding the tension between women's power and their oppression, between their strength and their vulnerability, offers a new lens for understanding the relationship between the state and society in the twentieth century.

Introduction; 1. Colonizing African families; 2. Confrontation and adaptation; 3. Domesticity and modernization; 4. Mothers of nationalism; 5. The struggle continues; 6. 'Messengers of a new design': marriage, family and sexuality; 7. Women's rights: the second decolonization?; 8. Empowerment and inequality in a new global age; Conclusion.

Iris Berger is Professor of History, Emerita at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of South Africa in World History (2009), Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History, with E. Frances White (1999); Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 (1992); and the award-winning Religion and Resistance: East African Kingdoms in the Precolonial Period (1981). She is also the co-editor of African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony and Refugee Rights (2015) and Women and Class in Africa (1986) and a past President of the African Studies Association.