Download or read book Widows in African Societies written by Betty Potash and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1986-02-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although widows constitute a quarter of the adult female population in many African societies, they have not been the focus of detailed, cross-cultural research. This is the first comparative anthropological study of widowhood in Africa, comprising ten case studies that cover a broad spectrum of societies in different parts of the continent. This volume shows clearly that widows are not passive objects of male transactions; they have interests and options, and make choices affecting their own lives. Ties to children, access to productive sources, and rights to housing are shown to have particular importance for widows' residential and marital decisions. This book provides a needed corrective both to the male perspective on kinship and to women's studies that deal almost exclusively with the adult married woman. In contrast to the traditional anthropological emphasis on widow remarriage and the functions such marriages have for the maintenance of marriage alliances, these papers deal with the women themselves and the quality of their lives. The introduction surveys the literature, examines the factors affecting the widows' strategies, and shows how accepted anthropological concepts of marriage, affinity, and community look different when considered from the perspective of widows. There is a foreword by Mariam K. Slater.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of African Women s Studies written by Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.
Download or read book A Cowrie of Hope written by Binwell Sinyangwe and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 2000 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reimagining of the Robin Hood legend tells the story of the young boy behind the bandit hero's rise to fame. Will Shackley is the son of a lord, and though just thirteen, he's led a charmed, protected life and is the heir to Shackley House, while his father is away on the Third Crusade with King Richard the Lionheart. But with King Richard's absence, the winds of treason are blowing across England, and soon Shackley House becomes caught up in a dangerous power struggle that drives Will out of the only home he's ever known. Alone, he flees into the dangerous Sherwood Forest, where he joins an elusive gang of bandits readers will immediately recognize. How Will helps a drunkard named Rob become one of the most feared and revered criminals in history is a swashbuckling ride perfect for anyone who loves heroes, villains, and adventure. From the Hardcover edition.
Download or read book Masterful Women written by Kirsten E. Wood and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many early-nineteenth-century slaveholders considered themselves "masters" not only over slaves, but also over the institutions of marriage and family. According to many historians, the privilege of mastery was reserved for white males. But as many as one in ten slaveholders--sometimes more--was a widow, and as Kirsten E. Wood demonstrates, slaveholding widows between the American Revolution and the Civil War developed their own version of mastery. Because their husbands' wills and dower law often gave women authority over entire households, widowhood expanded both their domestic mandate and their public profile. They wielded direct power not only over slaves and children but also over white men--particularly sons, overseers, and debtors. After the Revolution, southern white men frequently regarded powerful widows as direct threats to their manhood and thus to the social order. By the antebellum decades, however, these women found support among male slaveholders who resisted the popular claim that all white men were by nature equal, regardless of wealth. Slaveholding widows enjoyed material, legal, and cultural resources to which most other southerners could only aspire. The ways in which they did--and did not--translate those resources into social, political, and economic power shed new light on the evolution of slaveholding society.
Download or read book Praisesong for the Widow written by Paule Marshall and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1984-04-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Daughters and Brown Girl, Brownstones comes a “work of exceptional wisdom, maturity, and generosity, one in which the palpable humanity of its characters transcends any considerations of race or sex”(Washington Post Book World). Avey Johnson—a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls—has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel—and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed. “Astonishingly moving.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Widows in European Economy and Society 1600 1920 written by Beatrice Moring and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply researched and geographically wide-ranging study that reveals that widows were much more economically and socially active than is often thought.
Download or read book Worries of the Heart written by Kenda Mutongi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Lonely Days written by 'Bayo Adebowale and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Family Matters written by Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to European colonialism, Igboland, a region in Nigeria, was a nonpatriarchal, nongendered society governed by separate but interdependent political systems for men and women. In the last one hundred fifty years, the Igbo family has undergone vast structural changes in response to a barrage of cultural forces. Critically rereading social practices and oral and written histories of Igbo women and the society, Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu demonstrates how colonial laws, edicts, and judicial institutions facilitated the creation of gender inequality in Igbo society. Nzegwu exposes the unlikely convergence of Western feminist and African male judges' assumptions about "traditional" African values where women are subordinate and oppressed. Instead she offers a conception of equality based on historical Igbo family structures and practices that challenges the epistemological and ontological bases of Western feminist inquiry.
Download or read book Male Daughters Female Husbands written by Professor Ifi Amadiume and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, to critical acclaim. This compelling and highly original book frees the subject position of 'husband' from its affiliation with men, and goes on to do the same for other masculine attributes, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Boldly arguing that the notion of gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference, Male Daughters, Female Husbands examines the structures in African society that enabled people to achieve power, showing that roles were not rigidly masculinized nor feminized. At a time when gender and queer theory are viewed by some as being stuck in an identity-politics rut, this outstanding study not only warns against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures, but calls us to question the very concept of gender itself.
Download or read book Claiming Union Widowhood written by Brandi Clay Brimmer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Claiming Union Widowhood, Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentiary obstacles and personal scrutiny. Brimmer exposes and examines the numerous attempts by the federal government to exclude black women from receiving the federal pensions that they had been promised. Her analyses illustrate the complexities of social policy and law administration and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and class formation. Expanding on previous analyses of pension records, Brimmer offers an interpretive framework of emancipation and the freedom narrative that places black women at the forefront of demands for black citizenship.
Download or read book Lawful Sins written by Elyse Ona Singer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.
Download or read book Notes on Grief written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.
Download or read book African Religions written by Jacob K. Olupona and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.
Download or read book Black Widow Society written by Angela Makholwa and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1994 when South Africans were finally seeing the light of freedom and independence, three well-respected businesswomen – Talullah Ntuli, Edna Whithead and Nkosazana Dlamini – formed the Black Widow Society, a secret organisation aimed at liberating women trapped in emotionally and physically abusive relationships by assisting in ‘eliminating’ their errant husbands. For fifteen years the Black Widow Society operated undetected, impeccably run by The Triumvirate with the help of their suave and mysterious hired gun, Mzwakhe Khuzwayo, a slick ex-convict meticulous in his responsibilities. But as the secret organisation recruits more members, the wheels of this well-oiled machine threaten to fall off. Will Talullah’s controlling streak or Nkosazana’s unfettered material aspirations jeopardise the future of the Black Widow Society? Or perhaps one of the new recruits, unsettled by the reality of the elimination of her former husband, will lose her nerve and expose the workings of the group after all this time? As the tension mounts, Black Widow Society builds to a chilling and bloody climax that will keep you guessing and riveted until the very last page.
Download or read book The Widow s Cross written by Umejesi, Ike and published by Spears Media Press. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently widowed, Angelina Ibe, a smart, evangelical Christian and school teacher goes on an early morning evangelising mission and intentionally kills a python, one of the major totems in her community, Umuocha. This abominable act – at least viewed from the community’s perspective, brings her into direct collision with Umuocha’s guardians of tradition, led by the arch-conservative prime minister of Umuocha, Mazi Ikenga. Inevitably, the Igwe (King) of Umuocha, formerly a lawyer with a thriving practice in England, is embroiled in the drama. Whose side will he take and how far does Angelina’s battle go? Find out as you read this epic battle of wills that pits Angelina against time-honoured patriarchal institutions and individuals, determined to get their way by every means and at all cost.
Download or read book A World of Widows written by Margaret Owen and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 1996-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A World of Widows provides a global overview of the status for widowhood. Neglected by social policy researches, international human rights activists and the women's movement, the status of the world's widows - legal, social, cultural, and economic - is an urgent issue given the extent and the severity of the discrimination against them. Margaret Own explores the process of becoming a widow; poverty and social security in the context of widowhood; differing laws and customs regarding widow's inheritance; the situation of widows who remarry and issues of sexuality and health. She also looks at the needs of specific groups of widows - refugees, older widows, child widows - and widowhood in the context of AIDS. Throughout, she shows the prevalence of discrimination against widows in inheritance rights, land ownership, custody of children, security of home and shelter, nutrition and health. The book concludes with a summary of widowhood as a human rights issues and an overview of widows themselves organising for change.
