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Victoria B. Tashjian, Marjorie Keniston McIntosh. Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 336. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 922, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.922
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Extract
Marjorie Keniston McIntosh provides an overview of the history of Yoruba women between 1820 and 1960. Mainly a survey of the relevant secondary literature, the book is enriched by McIntosh's analysis of primary materials including travelers' accounts, mission records, Nigerian newspapers, colonial-era court transcripts, and the official and private writings of colonial administrators. Skillfully weaving together these sources, McIntosh creates a detailed and nuanced history of Yoruba women's lives, anchoring their experiences in the context of the major events affecting Yorubaland in the 140 years under investigation. She displays a sharp eye for regional variation, regularly noting distinctions between western, central, and eastern Yorubaland and particular Yoruba states.
McIntosh explores the major trajectories of Yoruba women's lives and how these evolved during the decades under consideration. This approach and timeframe allows her to highlight consistencies as well as discontinuities in the lives of Yoruba women resulting from both precolonial and colonial changes. She centers her investigation around three interpretive themes: gender and patriarchy; women's agency; and how women affected and were affected by the constellation of changes that came hand in hand with colonialism, including not only the political and judicial structures of British rule but also expanded export-oriented production, Western-style education, and heightened missionary activity. McIntosh's history is richly contextualized, situating Yoruba women's experiences in interesting mini-histories of a host of topics including precolonial Yorubaland's political, cultural, and economic contours, Yoruba religion, British colonialism, missionary activity, greater incorporation into the economy of the Atlantic world, unfree labor in the form of slaves and pawns, and the period of warfare following the early 1800s collapse of the Oyo Empire, which had provided stability throughout much of Yorubaland. Its end led, among other things, to the high degree of urbanization that characterized much of precolonial Yorubaland as people sought security in walled cities.
