Sean Redding’s research while affiliated with Amherst College and other places

This chapter argues that women's roles shifted substantially in the colonial and postcolonial periods in most of Africa. Specifically, in the precolonial period gender identities had been just one of many factors that determined social status for an individual. After 1918, colonial rule brought significant changes to women's gender roles. The flattening effect of colonial‐era laws on the status of African women continued into the late colonial and postcolonial periods, as African colonies emerged as independent nation‐states. The postcolonial period initially saw few changes in women's roles, and even those women who had played decisive parts in nationalist movements faced the same restrictions as they had under colonial rule. From the late 1990s onward, however, women themselves and the scholarly study of women have broken free of many earlier limitations, although poorer women with little access to education and social services continue to face challenges imposed by their gender and class status.

As whites consolidated political control over South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the economies of rural African families transformed. Redding investigates how, with the exodus of men as migrant labourers to the gold mines, African women became entrepreneurial market farmers in the Eastern Cape region. However, Redding contends, the colonial state’s legal restrictions on women’s property rights drained women’s economic resources and redefined them as dependents of men and ‘subsistence’ farmers. In tandem, accusations of witchcraft against women, often from relations or neighbours, increased as women exercised more power over familial resources. The cumulative impact of legal restrictions and witchcraft accusations threatened African women’s status and their opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial market farming by the late 1920s.