This collection of articles grows out of a symposium on the subject of women and work in Africa held on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois in the spring of 1979. The organizing committee for that program sought first, to update the field of economic studies of women in Africa and second, to provide a forum for the exchange and stimulation of ideas among scholars and professionals concerned for women in Africa. The publication here of the majority of the symposium papers represents a logical final step in the fulfillment of the objectives of the symposium program committee.
Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions. Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.
This collection of articles grows out of a symposium on the subject of women and work in Africa held on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois in the spring of 1979. The organizing committee for that program sought first, to update the field of economic studies of women in Africa and second, to provide a forum for the exchange and stimulation of ideas among scholars and professionals concerned for women in Africa. The publication here of the majority of the symposium papers represents a logical final step in the fulfillment of the objectives of the symposium program committee.
This collection of papers-all but one previously unpublished-presents the results of recent field research in the disciplines of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and economics. The chief emphasis here is on change: on viewing African women as agents of change from the first arrival of Europeans to the present; and on seeking to change the perspective from which African women have been studied in the past. The papers encompass settings as diverse as eighteenth-century Senegal and contemporary Mozambique. Politically and socially, too, the local settings are various, including an Igbo village, the marketplaces of Abidjan and Accra, a development scheme in rural Tanzania, the churches of Freetown, and the streets of Mombasa. The contributors are Iris Berger, James L. Brain, George E. Brooks, Jr., Margaret Jean Hay, Barbara C. Lewis, Leith Mullings, Kamene Okonjo, Claire Robertson, Filomina Chioma Steady, Margaret Strobel, and Judith VanAllen.
Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions. Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.
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