Africana Periodical Literature 
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| Title: | What Role Can History Play for the Newly Urbanized Women of Kenya and Tanzania? |
| Author: | Landau, Loren B. |
| Year: | 1995 |
| Periodical: | Ufahamu |
| Volume: | 23 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 29-54 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Kenya Tanzania |
| Subjects: | urbanization women Women's Issues Urbanization and Migration Labor and Employment History and Exploration migration Status of Women Sex Roles |
| Abstract: | Cities have the capacity to be a 'distinct social environment' in which, by taking control over their own labour and products, poor women can acquire status equal to that of the men of their respective class. The author outlines a feminist history of women's migration in Tanzania and Kenya and the way migration has affected women's position within kinship and family structures and the changing modes of economic production in the urban economic sectors of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi during the colonial and postindependence periods. She notes that specific economic policies and the omnipresence of patriarchal attitudes continue to manifest themselves in women's interminably inferior status. She also describes the failure of legislation to correct gender inequalities and the efforts by women's groups and organizations to improve the status of women. Examples of Latina 'cultural-symbolic' organizations indicate that women in Latin America have been able to exert their political will by building a horizontal movement around a shared occupation or belief. The author suggests that a shared identity formed through common economic activity could provide the solution and symbol in the East African context, rather than the belief in a fictional precolonial past that afforded women, at best, only secondary status. Notes, ref. |
