Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Women and Gender in Africa before 1700 2. Market Traders, Queens, and Slaves in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 3. Religion and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century 4. Colonial Era, 1850s to 1945: Work and Family 5. Politics, Leadership, and Resistance to Colonialism until 1945 6. Liberation Struggles and Politics from the 1950s to the 1970s 7. Work, Family, and Urbanization from 1970s to the 1990s 8. Women and Politics after Independence 9. Women at the Beginning of the 21st Century Bibliography Index
African women's history is a topic as vast as the continent itself, embracing an array of societies in over fifty countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. In African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, Kathleen Sheldon masterfully delivers a comprehensive study of this expansive story from before the time of records to the present day. She provides rich background on descent systems and the roles of women in matrilineal and patrilineal systems. Sheldon's work profiles elite women, as well as those in leadership roles, traders and market women, religious women, slave women, women in resistance movements, and women in politics and development. The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey establish a grand narrative about women's roles in the history of Africa.
Kathleen Sheldon is an independent scholar who has a research affiliation with the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa.
