In a landmark 1996 edited volume on urban women in Africa, Kathleen Sheldon wrote, “Women and gender have rarely held center stage in accounts of urban analytic issues.”20 Since then, a number of books have been published on African women in cities. Countering earlier publications that posited African women as “passive rural widows,” historians have demonstrated how women, like their male counterparts, migrated to cities in search of economic opportunities.21 Women usually worked on the margins of the colonial wage-labor economy, as beer brewers, sex workers, and hawkers. Focusing primarily on Southern and Eastern Africa and on colonies in which there were large numbers of European settlers, this research has argued that though small in numbers, women shaped the political economies of cities and rural regions from which they originated, as well maintained the social reproduction of African societies.22
Several decades of research have yielded a commonly accepted chronology of African women’s twentieth-century colonial history as marked by both opportunities and limitations. Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy have argued that the onset of colonial conquest and rule in the early twentieth century “intensified struggles over normative gender relations.” “Wicked women,” women who acted in ways outside the normative ideas of proper female comportment in urban areas across the continent, were at the forefront of historical change.23 The early colonial period, for the most part, ushered in openings for women of increased autonomy as officials created legal institutions and wrote legislation in attempts to make African societies legible.24 An unintended consequence was that women near European enterprises and colonial administrative centers brought marital disputes before officials, bypassing chiefs, who had been the “traditional” arbiters, and more easily obtained divorces.25
By the 1920s and 1930s, many scholars concur, colonial states and elder African men sought to enact control over women’s labor, marriage options, and mobility by applying new varied regimes of indirect rule. In settler colonies in East and Southern Africa, land alienation and the expansion of male migrant labor fixed women in rural areas under the adjudication of chiefs and newly articulated bodies of customary laws that rigidified the control of senior men over women.26 However, some researchers have countered, women’s status in rural areas was not so bleak, with young men and women contesting the control of senior men.27 Moreover, codification did not evenly occur, nor did it inevitably result in the “crystallization” of senior men’s power over women and junior men.28 Furthermore, scholars have demonstrated that the closing off of town life to women after the 1920s was not so categorical, showing that some women from Nairobi to Harare created niches for economic opportunity and social reproduction.29
During and in the aftermath of World War II, migration to cities increased across the continent, and British and French colonial officials turned their attention to creating a stable urban population composed of African men and women. From the Copperbelt to Harare to Lagos, elite Africans invoked politics of respectability to argue that African town life incorporate married couples and their children into permanent housing.30 After World War II, Africans surged to cities across Africa, even in apartheid South Africa, with redefined pass controls. As colonial officials in settler colonies viewed the presence of African women in towns with less approbation, they sought to encourage monogamous households of wage-earning men and women trained in European domestic arts. In towns such as Harare and Nairobi, an increased number of women circulated through cities, including wives joining their wage-laborer husbands for part of the year in town through “marital migrancy” and individual women working as small-scale traders.31
Research on women in West Africa, which included African societies with precolonial urban traditions and fewer European settlements, has demonstrated that restrictions on women’s and girls’ movement in urban areas and socioeconomic mobility were not so unilateral.32 Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian have shown that in 1930s Asante, Ghana women had possibilities for economic autonomy through cash cropping on their own farms, instead of husbands’ farms, in rural frontiers that bordered towns.33 That some women were able to maintain control over land and cash proceeds facilitated their control over their sexuality and choice in marital status. In spite of the consolidation of indirect rule and the codification of customary law in the 1930s, some customs remained fluid and others rigid, resulting in a “shifting customary terrain” in which men and women reconfigured the meanings of customary marriage law in colonial courts.34 Nevertheless, the dominant paradigm in the literature across East, West, and Southern Africa is that women did decline in economic, social, and legal status in the 1930s as chiefs, elder men, and colonial officials strove to limit their economic autonomy and ability to determine their marital lives and sexuality.
Research in women’s history in Francophone Africa, published in English or French, remains embryonic. In 1997, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch wrote that the history of African women was “almost unrecognized in French historiography.”35 Since then a few edited volumes and essays have indicated some momentum toward this research theme.36 Yet, by 2010, Pascale Barthélémy lamented the “as of yet little tread research path in France on the history of women and gender in Africa.”37
The small body of research on women in French-speaking West and Central Africa has called into question some generalizations in the historiography on colonial Africa. For example, as argued by Frederick Cooper, in the minds of British and French colonial personnel, “the gendering of the African worker [as male] was so profound it was barely discussed.”38 However, as demonstrated by Lisa Lindsay in her research on towns in southwest Nigeria, the ideal of “the male breadwinner” was not normative, but expanded in the 1950s and 1960s amid the debates of Nigerian men, women, colonial government officials, and employers about the intersections of wage labor and family life in an era of rapid change.39 Additionally, Pascale Barthélémy’s book on the twelve hundred–odd women from throughout West Africa who received formal education and diplomas in Dakar as nurses and midwives between 1918 and 1956 demonstrates how African women entered professional and salaried labor.40 Thus, the gender of the African worker, of the quintessential town dweller, and of the African city was not always normatively male. The work of Barbara Cooper on Maradi, Niger, and that of Phyllis Martin on Brazzaville, Congo, demonstrated how indelibly women, family life, and men’s and women’s marital aspirations were woven into processes of urban becoming well before the 1930s.41 Several factors contributed to the greater presence of women in towns in Francophone Africa versus Anglophone Africa. First, urbanism predated the implantation of colonial rule in some regions that became part of French West and Equatorial Africa. Second, the French weren’t as concerned as their British counterparts with impeding women from migrating to towns.42 In focusing on the intersections of the sexual economy and wage labor in Libreville, Conjugal Rights demonstrates that how to be male and how to be female were very much in question and shaped the true fabric of urban African life and modes of “urban becoming” in the years of colonial rule.
Conjugal Rights contributes to women’s history, but also seeks to engender central historiographical questions in African studies. In doing so, I follow Allman, Geiger, and Musisi’s call for “foregrounding women as historical actors,” with attention to “women as historical subjects in gendered colonial worlds.”43 Yet I also heed Joan Scott’s critique that “gender” has become synonymous with “women” and her call for scholars to conceptualize gender as changing constructions of what it meant to be male and female.44 The historiography of urban colonial Africa has detailed that colonial officials, African chiefs and elite men, and church personnel gendered colonial cities male. Yet this appears to be more ambiguous in Libreville. I trace the processes through which historical actors contested how men and women could occupy and interact with one another in the emerging cityscapes of streets, markets, homes, and rural suburbs. What constituted “feminine” and “masculine,” “public” and “private” space, and who could legitimately occupy such spaces in Libreville was not fixed, but fluid.
Examining the gendered processes of urban becoming in Libreville contributes to an emerging body of research that challenges the idea of patriarchal power and masculinity as monolithic in twentieth-century Africa. Twenty years after