Description
Book SynopsisIn
Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria.
Trade Review“One of the main planks on which this elegantly written book stands is the ideology of salvation as a political discourse and its deployment in the contestation over the notions of modern girlhood. The significance of
Making Modern Girls in African studies is incontestable—it is by all standards one of the most sophisticated studies of girlhood in colonial Africa. George presents her carefully mined primary data in an engaging manner, rendering a first-rate analysis of the struggle about the ideas of modern girlhood by a spectrum of people (Nigerians and British).” * American Historical Review *
“Firmly grounded and intellectually engaging,
Making Modern Girls makes a significant contribution to colonial urban social history and also to the study of the late colonial state, its nationalist opponents, and their ‘welfarist’ and interventionist attitudes.”
“By profiling the experiences of working-class girls—namely girl hawkers and ‘those who set out to save them in nineteenth-century colonial Lagos’—[George] emphasizes children as colonial subjects and discusses how an examination of their interactions with the colonial state adds a new perspective to our understanding of European rule, citizenship building, and knowledge production in Africa. …
Making Modern Girls has something to offer to all readers. … This work offers a deep perspective on the contours of modernity in colonial Africa, while presenting new insights into the links among gender, labor, and sexuality in colonial Africa.” * African Studies Review *
“George approaches the history of girls and girlhood through the lens of labour, focusing on the constitutive relationship between gender, class, generation, and work. Because of the dearth of scholarship focusing on girls as historical subjects, the author had to determine the different types of work that girls performed in public spaces and how adults responded to their labour. …
Making Modern Girls … makes a significant contribution to scholarly understandings of girls and girlhood in modern Africa. … It would be useful in a historical methods course to show how silences in the historical record can be read as sources in and of themselves.” * Canadian Journal of History *
