Abosede G. George has produced a readable and important study tracing the efforts of Nigerian and British reformers to restrict and reshape the social and economic life of girls engaged in petty trading in Lagos. This book is a welcome addition to Yoruba historiography. It has multiple strengths as it situates the study of girls within several intersecting bodies of literature – comparative constructions and theories on childhood, women's and gender history, labor history, urban history, colonial state formation, and the history of development. In the process, it paints a more complex picture of the post-Second World War-era when Nigeria experienced a substantial increase in colonial development aid.

Making Modern Girls brings to the forefront the experiences of girls whose voices and activities are often missing from the archives. Although George had few sources that reflect the voices of these young women, she used surveys and interviews effectively to construct a sense of their world, its routines and expectations. Her analysis illuminates the importance of child labor to household economies as well as the social significance of this labor. The training young girls received in trade prepared them for womanhood and the Yoruba cultural expectation of economic independence. Making Modern Girls also captures the multiple levels on which the discussion of young girls was not entirely about them. As reformers challenged the cultural presumptions and practice of child labor, girl hawkers became the living embodiment of disputes about child rearing, parenting, respectability, race, gender roles, and the colonial state.

Significantly, the study broadens the analysis of elite women's activism in Lagos, demonstrating the conceptual limitations of binaries such as colonizer/colonized. As George historicizes their political work, she shows that the elite women who tried to restrict the activities of girl hawkers did not imagine themselves as disempowered colonial subjects. Rather, they understood themselves as women of status; therefore, in possession of the power to shape the lives of these girls. In their efforts to control and restrict the labor of girl hawkers, elite women used the resources of the state to put in place a competing gender script for Yoruba women and girls. George helps us to understand this group of elite Nigerian women as historical actors who advanced ideas about modernity that were in dialogue with other notions of modernity. They held clear ideas about the role of the welfare state as well as their own ideas and expectations of the postcolonial state. George convincingly demonstrates that these women desired economic, political, and educational parity with men. However, their concept of parity placed them at odds with their male counterparts, who imagined the nation as masculine and elite women as their dependents.

Making Modern Girls integrates gender and sexuality into the analysis of urban history, enabling us to appreciate the changing nature of urban space in Lagos from the perspective of women of varying ages and socioeconomic positions. As the former capital city and still the commercial center of Nigeria, Lagos is an important location in the country's social and economic history. Historically women have been important economic actors through their dominance of local markets. Equally important, market women played pivotal roles in nationalist politics in Lagos especially when they supported early political parties and striking workers. Nonetheless, little has been written on women's experiences of Lagos's dramatic growth during and after the Second World War. Urban growth changed the geography of trade while the war brought a surge of male military personnel and workers to Lagos. Attention to girl hawkers in this changing urban context became enmeshed with discussions on prostitution. George's analysis of this discourse provides critical insight into how we can theorize sexuality, generational conflict, and race. Making Modern Girls deftly illustrates the ambiguities and complexities of the discourse around girl hawkers as reformers, colonial officials, and brothel owners struggled to define and control child sexuality.

Finally, this study contributes to the recent scholarship that re-examines the Second World War in Africa. In port cities like Lagos, Nairobi, and Freetown, the presence of colonial troops and increased urbanization had a significant impact on gender, social relations, and, especially, sex work. In all of these cities, sex work expanded significantly during the war and brought colonial officials into alliances with or in opposition to different groups of African reformers and revealed their assumptions about black male and female sexualities. Making Modern Girls expands the possibilities of comparative analyses of the Second World War, urbanization, and the sex trade.

In sum, Making Modern Girls is a compelling and provocative study that will generate much discussion in multiple fields. Graduate as well as advanced undergraduate students can utilize this work in courses ranging from history, anthropology, and women's and gender studies, to the Second World War.