Women in Africa are women who were born in, who live in, and are from the continent of Africa. The culture, evolution and history of African women is related to the evolution and history of the African continent itself.
Numerous short studies have appeared for women's history in African nations.[1][2][3][4] [5][6] Several surveys have appeared that put the sub-Sahara Africa in the context of women's history.[7][8]
There are numerous studies for specific countries and regions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria.[9] and Lesotho.[10]
Scholars have turned their imagination to innovative things for the history of African women, such as songs from Malawi, weaving techniques in Sokoto, and historical linguistics.[11]
Contents
1History of African Women
2Traditional roles
2.1In the home
2.2In society
3More Women Rights
3.1Education
3.2Women in the workplace
3.3Women in leadership
4Sexual harassment and gender-based violence
5See also
5.1North Africa
5.2West Africa
5.3Central Africa
5.4East Africa
5.5South Africa
6References
7External links
History of African Women
Female soldier of the PAIGC liberation army playing cards, Guinea-Bissau, 1973
The study of women's history in Africa emerged as a field relatively soon after African history in general became a widely respected academic subject. Historians like Jan Vansina and Walter Rodney forced Western academia to acknowledge the existence of precolonial African societies and states in the wake of the African independence movements of the 1960s, though they mainly focused on men's history. Ester Boserup, a scholar of historical economy, made waves among historians in her 1970 book Women's Role in Economic Development, which demonstrated the central role women had played over centuries of African history as economic producers, and how those systems had been disrupted by colonialism. By the 1980s, scholars had picked up threads of African women's history across the continent, including, as just a few examples, George Brooks' 1976 study of women traders in precolonial Senegal; Margaret Jean Hays' study of how economic change in colonial Kenya affected Luo women, published the same year; and Kristin Mann's 1985 study on marriage in Nigeria. Over time, historians have debated the role and status of women in precolonial vs. colonial society, explored how women have dealt with changing forms of oppression, examined how phenomena like domesticity became gendered, unearthed women's roles in national struggles for independence (Shikola, 1998; Presley, 1992), and even argued that the category of "woman" in some cases cannot be applied in precolonial contexts (Oyewumi, 1997). Women have been shown to be essential historical, economic and social actors in practically every region of Africa for millennia.
During the 1962 Algerian War of Independence, Algerian women fought as equals alongside men. They thus achieved a new sense of their own identity and a measure of acceptance from men. In the aftermath of the war, women maintained their new-found emancipation and became more actively involved in the development of the new state.[12]
