Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos by Abosede A. George (review)

The twenty-first century seems to be a century for saving the girl child. Nicholas Kristof devotes most of his columns in the New York Times to identifying girls in the developing world who are abused by their seniors for profit and for "traditions," and numerous international NGOs have set up operations across Africa and Asia and intensely market their product—girl-saving—to an audience in the West. Saving women and girls from forms of violence and expropriation has long been an excuse for colonial and neocolonial intervention, and today there is good reason to fear that the abused girl serves a similar role. Western agents act out their own fears about sexuality, the family, gender, and intergenerational exchanges, while creating rather nice careers for themselves in the process.

Although girl-saving as a profession can seem quite new and distinctly Western, Abosede George's fine book describes its complex history in Lagos, Nigeria, where a diverse set of interests converged to create the "problem" of the girl street hawker from the 1930s to the 1950s. Particularly important, in her narrative, are a group of elite, well-educated women whose lives spanned the Black Atlantic and whose political importance in the colonial context can be clearly seen in their concern for young girls hawking goods on the streets of Lagos. They worked in tandem with a colonial welfare office that was informed by developing British theories about juvenile delinquency and the universal nature of the child and that was increasingly staffed by professional social and child welfare agents deeply invested in creating a legal and social welfare framework appropriate to children. In George's narrative the interests and goals of civic activists and the colonial welfare office converge and diverge, both over the political role of the women and also over their understanding of the problem of girl hawkers. Lagosian elite women, themselves highly educated, saw education as the proper place for girls; the colonial office was more concerned to place in them in proper homes. In one fascinating account of the dismissal of a woman running a remand home (where girls were held pending trial or before being sent to home villages), the woman was reprimanded for not having vases of flowers in the house and for not maintaining a grassy lawn with attractive plantings. The aesthetics, as well as the mechanics, of a proper English home were seen to have remedial value. For the elite Lagosians, especially, focusing on girl hawkers suspected of sexual activity was a means of establishing their own class status, and also of distinguishing proper Lagosians from immigrants from rural areas.

Girls' sexuality, however, was at the heart of everyone's concern over girl hawkers. While delinquent boys were seen as acting out a particular stage of life—an adolescent phase of cowboy-ism, according to ideals of the time—girls who ventured onto the streets were seen as corrupted and victimized. The solution for boys was to give them skills and a trade, sometimes with a small grant to start them off in working life. The solution for girls was a return to domesticity, where their sexuality might be protected as daughters or, soon enough, as wives. Girl hawkers were thought to be either victims or purveyors of sex. Stories of raped and murdered girls were circulated in the newspapers; the archives are full of accounts of young girls entering men's lodgings to sell more than their material goods. George teases the practices of the girls apart into several strands. One is the importance of even very young girls' hawking activities in developing them as future market women, and for the monetary or social returns of the moment, when their labor connected them to the households in which they were embedded. Another is the very real practice of prostitution engaged in by some of the hawkers but...