It is surprisingly difficult to find a survey of African histories of women and gender that is accessible and engaging for students new to the field. This volume fills this gap for the twentieth century. It synthesizes scholarship that spans the continent while sustaining a persuasive argument, and includes a strong bibliography of scholarly and published primary sources. Iris Berger's distinguished career has included work on topics ranging from women's spirit possession in precolonial eastern Africa to women's trade unionism in South Africa; over the course of her career, Berger has helped to propel women's experiences from the margins of Africanist scholarship toward the center of the field.

In this book, Berger focuses on the core paradox of women's experiences in modern Africa. African women have often been subject to extreme forms of gendered discrimination and violence: a Liberian-American journalist dubbed Africa ‘the worst place there is to be a woman’ in 2005 (1). Yet in that same year, Liberia elected Africa's first woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose victory hinged on women's political mobilization. Berger argues that African women's struggles in male-dominated colonial and postcolonial societies have derived not from their weakness, but from their power: ‘[W]omen's critical position in society – producing, preparing, and selling food; giving birth to new generations; feeding, educating, and caring for their families; and sustaining traditions of healing and fertility – was precisely the reason that male family members and successive male-dominated governments sought to undermine their economic and political influence and to control their sexuality’ (4). Berger's argument unfolds through eight chapters and a brief conclusion, written in lively prose.

Berger lays the foundation for her argument in Chapter One, ‘Colonizing African Families’, which underscores how colonial rule was predicated on transformations in families and homes. Prior to colonialism, African women worked as farmers or traders, and sometimes both: providing for their families was fundamental to motherhood. With the mineral revolution in southern Africa, followed by the advent of colonial capitalism across the continent, white officials sought African men to work in mines and colonial cities, and to produce new cash crops. In line with Western gender norms, officials generally believed that African women should toil without pay at home, to sustain a cheap and productive male labor force. In this chapter and the next, Berger demonstrates how women invoked their historical responsibilities and power as mothers to challenge colonial officials’ attempts to govern their home lives and livelihoods, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. She highlights how material and spiritual dimensions were intertwined in women's resistance to colonial transformations of family: women both demanded the right to earn income to support their kin, and insisted that officials recognize the spiritual authority that motherhood conferred. In the Women's War in Nigeria in 1929, for instance, women organized to protest British restrictions on women traders, as well as census-taking policies that violated Igbo cosmological prohibitions on counting people – both policies that threatened women as mothers. This conflict was one among many movements in which women evoked their ‘critical position in society’ as providers and protectors to challenge colonial states. Chapters Three and Four explore how women's anticolonial organization assumed religious, trade unionist, and nationalist guises in the 1940s and 1950s.

Critically, Berger stresses that women living under colonial rule not only struggled against the state, but also grappled with African men's embrace of the new gendered opportunities that colonial rule provided them. While women had figured prominently in precolonial public life, men became the majority of mission school students, colonial employees, wage workers, and chiefs across the continent over the first half of the twentieth century, leading to public and private struggles between women and men. In Chapters Five through Eight, Berger shows how these tensions played out in the transitions to independence from the 1960s through the 1990s, as nationalists inherited colonial assumptions that claimed politics as a ‘male preserve’ and characterized women as subjects to be controlled (98). Yet in both private and public interactions between nationalist men and women, women resisted such subordination, often by highlighting their authority as ‘mothers of nationalism’ who had shaped men's consciousness (66).

Berger ultimately contends that the recent resurgence of women's efforts to organize for democracy, improve public health, and engage in conflict resolution reflects a ‘long history of women's solidarity. Rooted in a precolonial legacy of religious rituals, dance societies, political systems that gave women control of their own affairs, sex-segregated age grades, and cooperative farming groups, this collective tradition formed the basis of women's activism throughout the twentieth century, enhancing their ability to challenge policies that disrupted the well-being of their families and communities’ (202–3). Regional experts will question a few of the details in this sweeping account (for instance, Nwanyeruwa, a leading force in the Igbo Women's War, is called ‘Mwanyeruwa’ here). Yet this synthesis is compelling on the whole, and it will spark rich classroom discussions.