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Introduction Experience tells us that as the political process is being transformed and "decentralized" in Cote d'lvoire (Ivory Coast) and many other African countries, we can look forward to a new recognition of the important roles that women will play in this process. During the 1970s and 1980s, the experience of women in Abidjan provided sufficient evidence to challenge the myth that African women take an apolitical stance, and to challenge "conventional wisdom" that decrees African women's political power to have been destroyed by colonization, urbanization, and the difficult postindependence . Certainlythese factors, in addition to failed attempts at industrialization , did contribute to a significant loss of power for women.1 However, this study of political activity among a group of urban women in Abidjan in the 1970s and early 1980s demonstrates the survival and dynamism ofwomen's political involvementat the local level, and its importance to national politicalprocesses. The stereotype of apolitical African women resulted from the social-scientific concern with "nationalism" and "urban voluntaryassociations," and attempts to chronicle the rise of political parties in the struggle for African independence.2 Most writers noted that women's strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts were important contributing factors to the colonial decisions to relinquish power. However,because fewwomen managed to obtain leadership positions during this phase, and they participated in "women'ssections " of the national party, women's roles were generally underestimated as mainly supportive rather than determinative. The result was that women's participation was often relegated to a few lines on the pages of books about nationalist and independence politics. Anthropologists who studied post-World War II urbanization and voluntary association examined in great detail the organizations created by Chapter 8 Women and Grassroots Politics in Abidjan, Cote d'lvoire Carlene H. Dei Women and Grassroots Politics in Abidjan, Cote d'lvoire 207 women (Banton 1957; Little 1965, 1973; Heillassoux 1968). However, Little concluded that women's economic associations (consisting mainly of traders and prostitutes) were more important than women's political associations because "apart from the political parties which have women's sections, the groups which women form on their own rarely have political aims" (1965:18). Although he recognized that women organized for their economic interests and applied political pressure "behind the scenes," he underestimated their political concerns because they rarely stood for office in their own right. Subsequent concern on the part of political scientists and feminists with how power is defined and how political systems operate (Stacey and Price 1981:15, Randall 1982:40-41) has led to a shift away from a simple focus on voting and attitudinal studies of women. The spectacular absence of women from the formal political systemin most contemporary societies has led to an examination of what Rosaldo (1974) describes as the "public/ private" split. Yeteven within the confines of the "private realm" there has been the realization that women have held and wielded political power, albeit in informal, nonstructured, asymmetrical, or parallel ways.3 These more recent approaches challenge researchers in the field of women and politics to devote themselves to an examination of grassroots activities and community-level phenomena if they wish to see women at work politically (Baxter and Lansing 1980:116). In Abidjan and many other urban areas, formal and informal neighborhood groups are arenas in which women are significantlyactive. Although they appear invisible to those who do not live in the neighborhood, these groups are potential vehicles for mobilizing the socioeconomic and political power of urban women. Thus initial investigations can lead to the erroneous conclusion that only a few well-known, older Ivoirian female politicians of the independence era were interested or involved in politics. It was only after I had lived in Central Cocody for several years and had gotten to know people in the neighborhood on a fairly intimate basis that women's organizations such asthe Groupe d'Animation Culturel de Cocody (GACC) became visible to me. Then I became able to sort out how the cultural ties of ethnicity "intermittently" unite subsets of these women, and how women manipulate their networks and ties for purposes of political goals and leadership. In the present study, a focus on community-level dynamics (see Arensberg 1963; Leeds 1973), an awareness of how ethnic factors shape and reshape individual behavior (see Cohen 1978:382; Guyer 1981; Vincent 1974), and sensitivity to the importance of personal networks (see Bailey 1969; Mitchell 1969; Mitchell and Boissevain 1973) were important theoretical and methodological tools for investigating what women...

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