Politics of the Womb: Women, reproduction, and the State in Kenya

Although feminist and other scholars have long argued for the links between state interests and women's bodies, few have demonstrated the depth, complexity, and vitality of these relationships in such convincing and comprehensive detail as Lynn Thomas in Politics of the Womb. Drawing on legal cases, oral evidence, and remarkably rich and creative archival sources, Thomas probes how women's bodies, particularly their reproductive capacities, were central to efforts by the colonial and postcolonial state to assert and maintain political power in Kenya. Moreover, she explores how these reproductive interventions and debates shaped and were shaped by shifting relations and ideas about gender, generation, and governance. Through these struggles over the appropriate time, place, context, frequency, expression, experience, and meaning of sexuality and reproduction (and their repeated conflation), Kenyan men and women constructed and contested moral and material relations of power among themselves, and with their community and nation.

After a thorough overview of her theoretical frame in the introduction, ensuing chapters explore key moments in what Thomas calls the "process of historical entanglement" between state interventions and women's reproduction through a focus on the people and politics of Meru District in Kenya. These include early concerns with lowering the age of female initiation to reduce abortion rates and encourage population growth, efforts to train African midwives in order to eliminate female genital cutting, the disastrous colonial initiatives in the late 1950s to legislate and enforce the prohibition of female genital cutting, and the development and implementation of laws relating to premarital pregnancy in the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Her conclusion reviews the historical and theoretical lessons from these cases and explores their continuing salience in contemporary debates about female genital cutting, premarital pregnancies, and other reproductive domains.

Throughout the book, Thomas marshals detailed evidence from an array of written and oral sources to convey and explore the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, agency and power of all involved—men and women, young and old, Kenyan and British. Her careful attention to gender, generation, class, and "race" at once clarifies and complicates her analysis, as she shows how and why the alliances and fissures among different social and political factions shift over time. In so doing, she challenges scholarly approaches that refract all political disputes through the binary lens of colonizers versus subjects, assume (rather than demonstrate) the all-encompassing power of colonial discourses and categories, or use modernization paradigms to interpret contemporary social changes as a "breakdown of tradition."

Politics of the Womb is a smart, measured, engaging book that moves beyond the tired polemics of most debates on female genital cutting, premarital pregnancy, abortion, and other practices involving women's bodies. Instead, Thomas uses the Meru case to elucidate and illuminate the dynamic, hierarchical relationships of gender, generation, and political rule that shaped the contours and content of these debates and interventions. "Women's affairs" become politicized as "colonial affairs" (and later "national" and even "international" affairs) for reasons that Thomas details with analytical precision and demonstrates with rich empirical evidence. Her book promises to contribute to scholarly discussions in history, anthropology, African studies, and women's and gender studies.