Book Forum: History Matters by Judith M. Bennett

• Feminism, Patriarchy, and African Women’s History
• Iris Berger (bio)

Judith M. Bennett. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. viii + 206. ISBN 978–0–8122–3946–1 (cl); 0–8122–3946–6 (pb).

At a conference on African women’s studies held in the early 1990s, the virtual absence of interest in the past was striking. As speakers from across the continent outlined the state of research in their respective countries, history was mentioned rarely, and then only as a hypothetical baseline for change. At the time, I attributed this divide between history and activism to the dependence of African universities and their scholarly activities on funding from present–oriented development agencies. Yet reading Judith Bennett’s provocative, wide–ranging new book, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, has convinced me that African feminists are not alone in their inattention to history. Whether the key to mending this divide lies in focusing on the history of patriarchy and the “patriarchal equilibrium,” as Bennett proposes for Western feminism, is not as clear.

African women’s history developed in a different context than the history of women and gender in Europe and the United States. Relatively new as an accepted academic field, African history grew rapidly in the late 1950s and early 1960s as former colonies discarded the bonds of over a half century of foreign rule. Like all national entities, these emerging countries tied their legitimacy in part to a reimagined past, both precolonial and colonial. With a natural tendency to build an identity around ideas of unity, nationalist historical writings rarely entertained the idea of “women” as a social category, ignoring the abundant evidence of African women’s activist and organizational strength in many parts of the continent.

An interest in women as historical actors developed only in the early 1970s from the cross–fertilization of feminism, the general growth of women’s history as a field of scholarly inquiry, and an interest in women and development sparked by Ester Boserup’s pathbreaking 1970 study, Woman’s Role in Economic Development.¹ In response to Boserup’s bold hypotheses, many researchers designed local and regional studies to investigate her ideas more closely. Most important for Africa were two core themes: colonialism and imperialism had led to a decline in women’s status, and in most societies, women farmers played central economic roles. At a time when feminists in Europe and the United States were grappling with the nineteenth–century ideology of separate spheres that had siphoned women out of public life and into the household, an understanding of Africa’s different legacy (and how it changed under colonial rule) helped to mold a new era of historical research. Relying on Boserup’s model that traced women’s subordination to colonialism, many of these accounts portrayed precolonial Africa as a “golden age” of gender equity tarnished by the abrasive effects of colonialism and capitalism. Unlike the glorification of medieval Europe Bennett highlights, this idealization of precolonial gender relations was short–lived.

From its expansion in the 1970s, African women’s history has developed in ways that parallel women’s history in the United States and Europe, while also reflecting trends particular to African historiography. Similar to women’s history elsewhere, a compensatory concern with forgotten heroines—queen mothers, merchant princesses, spirit mediums, and participants in resistance struggles—yielded to an interest in peasant and working–class women (under the strong influence of Marxist–feminism and underdevelopment theory), and later to a focus on the meaning of gender in African historical contexts.² Rather than attributing women’s oppression and inequality primarily to colonialism, the newer works began to explore the “entanglement” of indigenous and external patriarchies, often arguing that new regimes of domination emerged from the collusion of colonial officials and African male elders.³ More recent studies have continued to challenge mainstream scholarship in new ways, both by proposing revisionist women–centered narratives on such key topics as the emergence of African nationalism and by foregrounding such issues of central concern to women as motherhood, sexuality, and childbirth, rather...