The first thing that is impressive about this book is the method. A set of interviews that Rebekah Lee conducted with Xhosa women living in Cape Town – or, to be precise, with a very carefully selected group of such women – forms its basis. Essentially, Lee chose a number of women who had been born in the 1920s and 1930s and who moved to Cape Town from the Eastern Cape in the 1940s and early 1950s. By the time she interviewed them they had all come to reside in a few streets in the township of Guguletu, which was created in the later 1950s. In addition to these women, she talked extensively to their descendants, mainly but not exclusively the daughters and granddaughters. At the core of this book, then, is a transgenerational oral history, in which, as it were, the limited number of variables in the sample frame of the informants is deliberately maintained. There is of course a bias in this, in that the families she discusses are those that ‘succeeded’ – at least to the extent that each grandmother survived, remained living in Cape Town, and maintained contact with her children. Perhaps this is not always taken fully into account in Lee's study. Nevertheless, her results are both very interesting and convincing, particularly because the oral material is combined in an exemplary manner with much archival research and, equally important, with the comments made by government commissions and other research projects over the years – a source often overlooked in historical work.

Conceptually, at the core of this book is the understanding that urbanization, certainly in South Africa, was a profoundly gendered process. There were a number of reasons for this, not least the consequences of the sex-specific legislation of the apartheid era, by which in principle the only African women who were allowed to reside in Cape Town were the dependants of men with such rights. There were also very considerable restrictions on women as the legal tenants of housing – ownership was of course impossible for all Africans under apartheid. But increasingly, at least among those who were interviewed, and probably in general, the women were becoming the central figures in the families which developed in Cape Town and elsewhere. This book demonstrates how the women of the families with whom Lee was in contact developed their economic lives, acquired houses and equipped them, and generally ran their families. At the same time, we can see how the generations related to each other, sometimes staying together in a single, if expanding, house, and sometimes moving out. Similarly, Rebekah Lee provides fascinating descriptions of how the families she discusses have earned their livings, and generally kept their households running – not always the easiest achievement in a world where, for a long time, formal employment was primarily a male preserve. In this, though, there seems to have been a slow decline in status and income across the generations, though this may in a variety of ways be the consequence of the research design, and thus of the sampling. There has been a steady increase in educational level, but not necessarily of the associated income. Furthermore, Lee shows how the first generation, in common with migrants all over the world, built an elaborate network of associations, notably rotating credit societies and church groups, but their fully urbanized granddaughters had much less need for such gatherings, as they had established links of their own while growing up.

Throughout these discussions, the importance of kinship is never far from the surface, but it is based on the relationships between the women, rather than, as ‘traditional’ Xhosa ethnography would have presumed, via men. Membership of patrilineal kinship groups was no longer of importance, at least for the women. Perhaps it never had been, except in so far as women were incorporated through their sons. Once women were in the towns, the importance of males as bearers of patrilineal identity decreased de facto.

This is but one of the fascinating conclusions which can be drawn from Rebekah Lee's book. In general terms, too much South African history has been about ‘the struggle’, or about the developments in the country's political economy, and far too little about the development of ‘daily life’, let alone the ways in which the two are connected. It is in this sort of fine-textured local social history that much of the advance in South African historiography has been and will continue to be made. This is a fine, well-written, if not entirely unproblematic book, integrating history and anthropology in a way in which self-consciously historical anthropology rarely does.