The past twenty years have witnessed a real coming of age of gender and women's history in Africa, though the methodological and temporal parameters of that development has been fairly fixed, with social history the dominant approach and the colonial period the chronological focus of the vast majority of inquiries. Lorelle Semley's Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass builds upon this foundational scholarship, while also turning a lens to ritual and symbol, as it focuses on the shifting meanings of mother/father in the West African Kingdom of Kétu, from the precolonial period to the present. Semley's title is inspired by the popular Yoruba saying, ‘Mother is gold, father is glass’, which, she argues, captures the historical tensions between gendered power and vulnerability in Yoruba society. That mothers are gold points to value and durability; that fathers are glass suggests an illusory, or even fragile, presence that seems to defy notions of entrenched patriarchal power.

While the symbolism of gold and glass appears, at first glance, to constitute a rather straightforward binary, Semley deploys it across time and space to excavate the shifting content and meanings of women's power as ‘public mothers’ and of women's vulnerability as wives and slaves. Over the course of nine chapters (which include a substantive prologue and epilogue), she brings a rich variety of evidence to the table – traveler's accounts, oral historical narratives, myths, and symbols, to name just a few – and then uses one kind of source to interrogate another. In her first chapter, for example, she looks at oral traditions collected in the nineteenth century, historical narratives she encountered as a researcher, as well as Church Missionary Society sources, in order to explore precolonial myths of origin and to juxtapose tales of the ‘founding (historical) father’ and the ‘mythical or, better, metaphorical mother’. Here, Semley lays the groundwork for the core questions that run through her subsequent chapters: how do we make sense of the mythical public power of ‘the mother’ in the face of traditions and narratives that privilege the ‘founding father’ or the king, and how can we think about that power, that symbolism as historical, as changing over time. Semley's next chapter begins to answer these questions by exploring the highest forms of political power held by senior women in the precolonial period. Her focus on ‘ladies of the palace’ quickly dispels any notion that public motherhood was somehow ‘natural’. Indeed, Semley demonstrates the importance of disentangling ideas of ‘public motherhood’ not only from biological motherhood, but from biological sex. As her narrative unfolds, we are able to see the complex ways in which women functioned, as ‘mobile and flexible symbols of religious power’ and were therefore, at the same time, ‘vulnerable and valuable, easily sacrificed and highly praised’ (p. 49). It is in her discussion of the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that this argument is at its most compelling, as we witness the power of the eighteenth-century ‘public mother’, who stood alongside the king, erode in the face of the massive accumulation of royal wives at the height of the trade.

It is not until Chapter Four that Semley turns to the colonial period and French efforts to make sense of gender and power in Kétu. Here her argument seems a bit more familiar, in terms of the broader contours of African women's history, although she brings some fascinating new evidence to the fore, beginning with the little known story of two ‘queens’, Alaba Ida and Yá Sègén, who the French empowered and upon whom they relied in the first years of colonial rule. Given the complete political marginalization of women in later decades, it is interesting to trace the changing roles of ‘mothers’ and wives during a moment when at least a few European administrators had concluded that ‘women really matter’ (p. 71). The following chapter moves from the political and public to the private and domestic with an examination of how the French tried to define and then to reform marriage practices, often in response to what seemed to be the unpredictable and surprising actions of young married women and women elders.

While the core of Semley's analysis focuses on women, her last chapters return men, in their public and private roles, to the unfolding story. Chapter Six is concerned with the ‘politics of manhood’ on the eve of independence, particularly with how the development of a discourse about ‘father of the family’ was used to assert claims for political and economic rights. The final chapter, perhaps the most innovative of all, poses the very same core questions to the development and organization of Candomblé in Brazil, as it traces the histories of founding fathers, kingship, and public motherhood into the diaspora. This is a bold and innovative chapter that gets us beyond ‘African survivals’ by providing a template for thinking critically, carefully, and comparatively about gender and power, symbols and history-making on both sides of the Atlantic.

By excavating that ambiguous, shifting space between the rhetoric of Yoruba women's power as queens and mothers, and the realities of women's vulnerability and subordination as wives and slaves, Semley's Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass makes an original and important contribution to women's history generally and to Yoruba history specifically. Her rich and varied evidence and her clear and elegant prose also make this book an excellent and accessible option for the undergraduate classroom.