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Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya » (1st Edition)

Book cover image of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya by Lynn M. Thomas

Authors: Lynn M. Thomas
ISBN-13: 9780520235403, ISBN-10: 0520235401
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: August 2003
Edition: 1st Edition

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Author Biography: Lynn M. Thomas

Lynn M. Thomas is Assistant Professor of History and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Book Synopsis

"
In Thomas's skilled hands, and in her unabashed love of story-telling, intimate events in Kenya help us think more clearly and more critically about Africa in the twentieth century. The politics of the womb are at the core of the colonial experience and of colonial politics. . .. Africans struggled amongst themselves over the regulation of reproduction, and these layers of intimate strife, and the policies and protests emanating from London and mission hospitals and African homesteads, give us something we haven't had before— a gendered and transnational colonial history."—Luise White, author of Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Introduction1
1Imperial Populations and "Women's Affairs"21
2Colonial Uplift and Girl-Midwives52
3Mau Mau and the Girls Who "Circumcised Themselves"79
4Late Colonial Customs and Wayward Schoolgirls103
5Postcolonial Nationalism and "Modern" Single Mothers135
Conclusion173
Notes187
Bibliography235
Index289

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