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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Women and Landed Property in Gondarine Ethiopia |
Author: | Crummey, Donald |
Year: | 1981 |
Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
Volume: | 14 |
Issue: | 3 |
Pages: | 444-465 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Ethiopia |
Subjects: | customary law land law women Women's Issues Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/217699 |
Abstract: | In the studies on Ethiopia women rank very high among the neglected themes. The historian of Abyssinian society concerned with position of women must start from the ground up. This paper attempts to document the position of women with respect to only one, altough extremely important, facet of Abyssinian society: landed property. The author studied land transaction as the prelude to a socio-political history of Ethiopia from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The available material - land charters published by Conti Rossini, manucripts and documents in the British Library and Cambridge University collections - yielded substantial amounts of significant data on the position of women, although not without certain limitations. From his observations the author concludes that men and women may have held equal rights in land in Gondarine Ethiopia, but that they did not exercise these rights equally. Men dominated and controlled land; and where women had it, men tended to get it. Notes, tab. |