Misbehaving Women Make History

Hodgson, Dorothy L., and Sheryl A. McCurdy, eds. "Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001. xii + 325 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-325-07005-9 (cl); 0-325-07004-0 (pb).

On the wall over my desk I have a bumper sticker bearing the slogan, "Well-behaved women seldom make history" (from an essay by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich that actually focused on well-behaved women who did make history). The phrase captures the central theme of this collection—that women in a variety of African societies made history by misbehaving. There are fifteen chapters in this collection, nine of them new and six which previously appeared in journals, most notably a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies, that included earlier versions of four of these papers plus two others not reprinted here. ¹ Although they address a variety of situations, time periods, and geographic spaces, the theme of misbehavior connects these otherwise widely divergent papers. Most are on English-speaking Africa—four on Nigeria, three on Tanzania, two on Ghana and the rest divided among the Gambia, Lesotho, Uganda, and Zambia. The one contribution on a non-English location is Barbara Cooper's essay on women's urban associations, their public behavior, and how active women are sometimes called prostitutes in Niger.

One of the first issues addressed is the use of the term "wicked," which the editors suggest has contradictory meanings. On the one hand, it has been a pejorative term applied to women who stepped over boundaries, and could be used to stigmatize such women. Yet on the other hand, "'wickedness' refers to a manifestation of feminine power whereby women purposefully and effectively challenge political, social, or cultural constraints on their behavior" (6-7). The book is divided into four general categories, though the themes of marriage in "Contesting Conjugality," politics in "Confronting Authority," urbanization in "Taking Spaces/Making Spaces," and differences between women in "Negotiating Difference," overlap in interesting ways. Issues related to marriage, for instance, appear in nearly every article, and are clearly a nexus of change and resistance in both colonial and post-colonial contexts.

I will comment on a selected few of these uniformly interesting and well-written essays to give a sense of the questions addressed. Misty Bastian discusses women's resistance in southeastern Nigeria in the years immediately preceding the Women's War of 1929. Her detailed description and nuanced analysis suggests that Igbo women were enmeshed in a variety of economic, cultural, and religious changes that were undercutting the social status of market women in particular. One factor was mission interests in dressing young girls in cloth, although wearing cloth had formerly been a prerogative of well-to-do older women; another element was the encroachment of British colonial men into areas women had controlled, as the imposition of taxes on women intruded into women's management of markets and trade. Women responded with a series of public dances and protests which centered on a pantomime of sweeping. British reports tended to see this as literally about hygiene, while Bastian suggests that it was a profoundly metaphorical statement about social pollution. By traveling to villages throughout the region and performing a dance about sweeping, women were claiming that bad influences such as colonialism should be rooted out. Other contributions on Nigeria by Judith Byfield, Andrea Cornwall, and Philomena Okeke intersect with Bastian's piece in ways that bring greater clarity to all four.

Richard Schroeder, in writing about women and market gardens in 1990s Gambia, demonstrates a complex and rapid change in women's work, men's work, household budgeting, and spousal relations. Again the impact of international interests was a factor in the changes, as aid projects targeted women and assisted them in developing a strong market for their rice and vegetables. As the women spent more time working, they were forced to abandon some of the chores their husbands expected. But simultaneously women...