A Perspective from African Women's History: Comment on "Confronting Continuity"

A Perspective from African Women's History: Comment on "Confronting Continuity" Sandra E. Greene In European History, whether we have looked at ancient, medieval , early modern, or modern women, we have tended to see that era within a framework of transformation in women's status.... We pay lip service to continuity and then side heavily with change... continuity seems to be more than boring; it also calls into question the way we practice history. Judith Bennett On reading Judith Bennett's observations about European history— and more specifically medieval women's history—I was initially struck by the veracity of her observations. They certainly represented my understanding of what really distinguished the field of history from other disciplines. They also reminded me of comments I had received from the editors of my most recent book, a historical study of gender relations in precolonial West Africa that drew heavily on the discipline of anthropology . These comments went something like this: "this is all very interesting , but we are interested in publishing a series in African history; where is that element of change; it just doesn't come out clearly enough; this is supposed to be history after aU." My response: I dutifuUy recognized my obligation as a historian and proceeded to reorganize the way I had constructed the manuscript. I quite expUcitly emphasized the changes in gender relations that had occurred over a period of 300 years, while consigning the continuities to a still visible but obviously less prominent section of the manuscript.1 But can one call this "tension between continuity and change"? Does African history—and more specifically, African women's history—only "pay lip service to continuity and then side heavily with change"? Do historians of African women's Uves feel the necessity "to legitimate women as historical subjects by showing that women's lives have change and transformation " as Bennett states is true for historians of European women's lives, or do other considerations dominate the historical work on African women? One cannot, of course, give a simple answer of yes or no to these questions and still do justice to the complexity of issues and concerns that © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 96 Journal of Women's History Autumn have affected the historical study of women of Africa. For example, the text that most influenced the study of African women's history after the 1970s (when this area of inquiry expanded considerably) was not a historical study at all, but rather an analysis of African development economics: Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development.2 In this book, the author analyzes the status of women in a number of rural agrarian African societies and concludes that colonialism brought a major decline in the status of African women because of the patriarchal orientation of colonial rule. Read extensively by scholars interested in pursuing more historically grounded studies, research on African women blossomed. Those historians who took up the challenge to study more deeply the history of African women most often defined their work in ways quite typical for historians. They, like the historians of European women, focused on changes (as opposed to continuity) in the status of women, and linked these changes to the major transformational points in African history . In the first widely-read collection of historical essays on African women—Hafkin and Bay's Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (1976)—the essays by Van Allen, Robertson, and Brooks and Hay examine the transformational impact on African women of three major periods of change in early trade contacts with Europeans, coloniaUsm, and "modernization." All note that these periods under review generated a major change in the status of African women under study; all emphasize the extent to which the changes studied were either liberating or disempowering for women. And when the editors of the volume summarize the findings of the various contributors, they too emphasize the extent to which the lives, societal position, and status of African women changed especially under colonial rule. African women lost political as well as economic status under coloniaUsm. When they introduced their systems of colonial rule, Europeans failed...