Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda 1900-2003 (review)

Professors Grace Kyomuhendo and Marjorie McIntosh have entered the debate between Africanists who believe that western feminist scholarship is generative for Africanists and those who believe that it does not. In their recent publication, Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda 1900-2003, Kyomuhendo and McIntosh argue that Ugandan women’s history is full of struggles both in practical terms and a personal emotional sense. While women struggled to work in order to support themselves and their families, they confronted powerful ideological opposition to any work outside the domestic context.

All its weaknesses notwithstanding, this book will be well-received in African scholarship and policy-making sectors. It provides a background of Uganda women’s history in the 1860s-1890s (the wee hours of Uganda’s loss of freedom to European imperialism), and an in-depth analysis of how women’s work and domesticity changed with successive epochal changes between 1900 and 2003.

The co-authors present a readable book with varied topics from the impact of HIV/AIDS on women to the roles of Western Education and religion, patriarchal political order, capitalist economy, public health, and ideological factors in creating a gendered society in Uganda during the twentieth century. In terms of depth of analysis and breadth of material covered, the book is a pioneering work in its field in Eastern Africa. The benefits of this study lie in its sound recommendation of strategies that will improve women’s circumstances in the future and which can be applied anywhere in Africa with resultant benefits to the continent.

However, Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda has several structural, conceptual and material/factual weaknesses that the remainder of this review will deal with. Even though the book is a collaborative work of a western and an African scholar claiming to minimize Western epistemological and academic assumptions, there is no trace of a marriage between Western and African viewpoints; the paradigm remains essentially Western. The co-authors actually amplify a common perception within feminist gender studies—that Uganda women’s history is a glass half empty and a narrative characterized by negative experience and misery. The pair follows a well orchestrated feminist effort to construct and invent a vague Uganda. What they call the uniqueness of Uganda is but the imperial obliteration of Uganda’s history and the subsequent dearth of information about women’s historical exploits. While rejecting the dichotomy of public and private spheres they ignore what is essentially in African logical context a separation between backstage and public stage discourses.

Contrary to the pair’s argument, neither did tradition victimize Uganda women nor were they restricted to the kitchen. Evidently, “At the turn of the century, before the society had experienced the dislocations of cash economy, British overrule, and the extreme population loss of sleeping sickness, women in Uganda could turn to their clans and their immediate relatives, and to their rulers to force husbands to treat them within certain bounds (70).”

Even at the height of patriarchy women demonstrated tenacity within the gendered colonial culture. To remain relevant in a changing colonial world (and unfortunately the authors seem not to see this development), Ugandan mystical women, for example, adjusted by converting to Christianity as a new source of authority, just as did women in the sixteenth-century Kongo Kingdom convert to Catholicism to combat the political and cultural influence of the Portuguese. The story of Kongo’s Donna Beatriz encapsulates African women’s resilience in any form of gendered competition.

Moreover, the co-authors wandered their way out of focus in many areas. The book presents too much of the good history of Uganda, which may not be necessarily pertinent to their central theme. The background material could be cut down to a mere summary and immediately tied to the central focus of the book. Additionally, the structure of the book assuming an ethnic-based analysis leaves the reader wondering about the authors’ ability to construct a set of themes that unite women’s...