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Award-winner Claire Robertson employs a variety of approaches to analyze and weave together this wide-ranging study. Her book provides an extensive case study of historical transformations in gender, agriculture, residence, and civil society. Based on archival documents, library sources (fiction and nonfiction, primary and secondary), surveys and oral histories, participant observation, and quantitative and qualitative analysis, Robertson breaks new ground by focusing on traders in one commodity, dried staples, and comparing and contrasting the evolution of women's trade with men's trade

This article addresses how theory has shaped the author's choice of
research topic and analysis as she takes her readers on a journey to
Ghana, Kenya, North America, and Saint Lucia. Coming from the position
of a reformed materialist feminist moving toward cultural materialism,
the author examines how theory helped her empirical work or contributed
to problems; she determines whether theory has helped her to see what
scholars otherwise have ignored, or caused her to overlook aspects
of the data that still need analysis. This relationship provides
a pragmatism and flexibility useful for making historical analysis
reflect its grass roots in the data. Thus, the author uses the term
"materialist" in two senses, both in the tradition of (in her case,
revisionist) Marxist economic analysis and in the sense of a close
connection to the data, the "materials." The author's odyssey through
many geographical and theoretical locations forced by the data has led
to her attempt to syncretize approaches in developing the concept of
cultural materialism. Cultural materialism involves imbricating culture
with economy in ways that illuminate both.

Part I. Representations of and by African women. Front and center on the global stage: representations of and by African women in contemporary novels / Elizabeth M. Perego -- Contrasting visions: filmic representations of African women / Cajetan Iheka -- Part II. Religion and politics. Politico-religious systems and African women's power / Nwando Achebe -- Colonialism and resistance: protests and national liberation movements / Kathleen Sheldon -- Religious fundamentalisms and women in contemporary Africa / Ousseina Alidou -- African women organize / Alicia Decker and Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois -- Women's political activism in contemporary Africa / Aili Mari Tripp -- Part III. Economy and society. African women in the real economy: prehistoric, precolonial, colonial, and contemporary transitions / Gracia Clark -- Women and slavery: continuities and changes / Claire Robertson -- Education for African girls: still striving for equality / Josephine Beoku-Betts -- Urbanizing women: merging the personal, political, and spatial / Teresa Barnes -- Women and the new African diaspora / Cassandra Veney -- Part IV. Love, marriage, and women's bodies, past and present. Love, marriage and families in Africa / Rachel Jean-Baptiste and Emily Burrill -- Gender and sexuality: gradations, contestations / Signe Arnfred -- Violence against women: households, wars, refugees, and resistance / Henrietta Ballah and December Green -- African women and health: evolving challenges / Karen Flint -- Coda / Abena Busia

1. "I Am Berida Ndambuki" : Childhood, Family, and Initiation -- 2. "No woman can know what will happen to her in marriage" : Marriage, Children, and Survival -- 3. "Now I was in business": Work : From Kathonzweni to Nairobi -- 4. "The Akamba are a peaceloving people" : Ethnicity, Religion, and Politics -- 5. "I ask myself, why did I have my children?" : Life and Death -- Postscript: Our Relations : On Friendship and Cross-Cultural (Mis)Understanding.