Women, Power, and Economic Change
Women, Power, and Economic Change

Author: Regina Smith Oboler

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780804712248

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The author examines the impact of colonialism and the cash economy on the Nandi, a semi-pastoral and patrilineal people of western Kenya, emphasizing changes in women's and men's economic roles and their respective relations to property and to each other. Since the sex roles associated with production and property relations are linked to sex roles in other areas - in the marriage system, husband-wife relations, kinship, cultural ideals of male and female, ritual relations, participation in community affairs - these areas are also analyzed. The author asks whether the changes in Nandi society have been favorable or unfavorable to women. Has their economic position improved or declined as a result of colonialism and socioeconomic change? Has sexual stratification increased or decreased? How have different categories of women - wives, widows, never-married women, participants in woman-woman marriages - been differently affected by changed circumstances? Although most of the book is ethnographic in nature, providing a detailed account of Nandi inter-gender roles in the context of economic history and at the processes that have induced changes in the respective roles of men and women.

Womanhood and Girlhood in Twenty-First Century Middle Class Kenya
Womanhood and Girlhood in Twenty-First Century Middle Class Kenya

Author: Besi Brillian Muhonja

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1498534341

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This study of twenty first century girlhoods and womanhoods charts a new area of scholarship on Kenya. The chapters investigate questions related to how new rituals of girlhood and womanhood that materialize when religious, indigenous, and foreign worlds encounter each other are re-structuring family and society, recasting roles, and informing fresh conceptualizations of African girlhood and womanhood. The author’s interdisciplinary analysis and writing journeys through the different stages of girlhood and womanhood as ritualized by Kenya’s 21st century middle class, and teases out the implications of these peculiarities to identity (re)creation and the restructuring of societies’ organs, and traditionally gendered institutions. Applying a critical African studies lens, the arguments in this book center women as originators of action and thought without inquiring into a male other. Essentially, this work disrupts patri-centered constructions and examinations of female bodies and identities. The resulting deductions inform on the substratum of Kenyan girls and women’s self-definitions as manifest through their experiences and ritualized practices, and articulate the impact of the performances of these bodies and identities on Kenyan and global societies.