Iris Berger’s Women in Twentieth-Century Africa is a thoroughly accessible textbook that also captures the complexities of African women’s lives in the twentieth century. Composed of an introduction, eight chapters, a conclusion, and a short epilogue, the book strikes the right balance between chronology and thematic organization. The chronological backbone of the text begins with end of the nineteenth century and takes readers through early and late colonialism, decolonization, the postcolonial period, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The postcolonial period is further differentiated according to the economic crisis and structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, the onslaught of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the civil wars that shadowed the new democratic movements of the 1990s. Each chapter contains rich accounts of social history that reveal the contradictory ways in which larger political, economic, and cultural forces shape the spaces women inhabit as mothers, wives, daughters, subjects, and citizens. Berger successfully challenges the often diametrically opposed representations of African women—as downtrodden or powerful—as well as the tendency to reduce African women to monolithic groups. The narrative demonstrates the ways in which women’s experiences throughout the twentieth century were shaped by dynamic and competing ideologies of masculinity and femininity, local cultures, and the various stages in the life cycle.

One of the important innovations in this text is the way in which Berger revisits certain topics in different chapters, thus deepening the reader’s appreciation of change, continuity, and context. She notes, for example, that as colonial states consolidated missionaries, colonial officials “intervened more aggressively in women’s personal lives through efforts to transform and regulate coming-of-age ceremonies, marriage and childbirth practices . . .” (10). These interventions targeted cultural areas perceived as uncivilized, but in some colonies, such as the Belgian Congo, they coincided with the state’s efforts to increase birth rates. Marriage was also a site through which men and women reinforced or challenged cultural norms or marshaled resources to navigate the colonial economy. In Maradi (Niger), divorce and remarriage allowed women to “progressively negotiate better material and social conditions” (17), while in the Gold Coast men who launched cocoa farms on nonlineage lands relied increasingly on the unremunerated labor of their wives. The topic of marriage is revisited in chapter 6, which focuses on the period after 1980 and shows that marriage remained a central concern in the postcolonial period. Some states struggled to legislate the age of marriage and wives’ access to marital property, while women used the resources of the courts to obtain child support in a period wracked by high levels of unemployment and impoverishment.

This strategy of revisiting various topics also allows Berger to consider political history in refreshingly new ways. It helps her illuminate, for example, the changing practices and agendas of women’s political activism, such as the ways in which women’s participation in the liberation movements in Eritrea, Zimbabwe, and Namibia brought to the fore questions of male dominance on the battlefield and in the postwar era, as well as concerns about rape and access to birth control. Berger also incorporates international women’s movements into the discussion of African women’s political engagement. The Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWAD), one of the most important organizations to emerge during the U.N. Decade on Women, helped institutionalize greater dialogue among women in the Global South and transform the discussion about development. Transnational dialogue has been a longstanding feature of African intellectual and political life, but transnationalism has become increasingly important to the economic well-being of African families and communities. Therefore, the recent growth of African diasporic communities in Asia, Europe, and North America deserves further discussion.

Finally, Berger demonstrates that we can write general histories that do not flatten the human experience. New ways of thinking about love, fashion, and sexuality shaped the twentieth century for African women as much as markets, states, and wars did. She has provided a rich synthesis of data drawn from old and new classics as well as examples from East, West, central, and southern Africa. Thus students at all levels will find this text invaluable.