Introduction Karin Pallaver (bio) and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (bio) KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, production, business This special issue aims to examine the participation of women in the economy of several sub-Saharan African countries by looking into multiple forms of female labor in a historical and comparative perspective.1 To do so, the authors make reference and apply the methodological approach that has been developed by the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations (1500–2000)," under the initiative of the International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH) in Amsterdam.2 The history of labor in Africa became central in the field of African Studies after independence.3 Being strongly influenced by Marxist theory, the studies of the 1960s and 1970s focused on class formation and proletarianization and showed how a waged labor force developed during the colonial period and became stabilized from the 1940s onwards. This scholarship was particularly attentive to local African perspectives and experiences,4 and stressed the role of African wage laborers in independence movements, shedding light on the initiatives they developed under the power structures imposed by colonial rule.5 In this scholarship, the study of the impact of colonialism on African laborers was therefore critical. With its perpetual search for labor, the colonial state no doubt transformed labor and laborers in Africa. Nonetheless, [End Page 1] waged work never became the most important labor relation among African workers.6 As Bellucci and Eckert recently pointed out, in sub-Saharan Africa "the male proletarian does not represent the quintessential worker but is rather one among a number of categories of workers whose histories are connected."7 Among these workers, women no doubt played a critical role. Given the strong focus on wage labor, the role of African women was largely invisible in the early studies on African labor, as women, with very few exceptions, were very rarely involved in waged work. In the late 1970s, however, gender started to receive a new attention from scholars interested in the history of African labor.8 This new interest also stemmed from multiple studies by economists and social scientist who, starting from the 1960s, made important contributions to assess women's participation in the economies of western countries as well as of non-western ones, including sub-Saharan African states.9 Among them, Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development was particularly important, as it stressed the need to include the domestic work that women performed in general studies of female labor.10 This produced an extensive volume of studies on gender and rural populations in Africa and on the role of women in economic development, that went beyond waged and urban labor and challenged universalist conceptions of labor and productivity and how Africans reinvented them.11 In the 1980s, however, studies of African female labor became critical towards Boserup's approach, in that it considered "women as pawns rather than actors."12 Preoccupied to show African women's agency and initiatives, these works stressed that women were not only victims of African patriarchy or the exploitation of the colonial state, but rather actively responded to socioeconomic changes. Works such as Judith Olmstead's on Ethiopia or Carolyn Clark's on Kikuyu women showed how women, even if working under structures of male dominance and patriarchal relations, were able to influence economic and social processes.13 Thanks to these perspectives, studies on women's labor history in Africa have significantly improved our understanding of precolonial African societies, the impact of colonialism, and post-independence trajectories.14 At the basis of the precolonial agrarian social organization was a gendered division of labor. Even if obviously characterized by local variations, men performed activities such as hunting, building houses, or preparing the land for cultivation, whereas women took care of the cultivation of food.15 Colonialism had no doubt a strong impact on African female laborers: their workload increased because men were away; they had reduced access to land and political power; their economic position often declined, both in relation to their former lives and vis-à-vis men; and they had limited access to formal western-type education and therefore to skilled and better paid jobs, due...

Category	Quartile
历史学	4
历史学, 历史学	4

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