This conference seeks to address the problems of researching and writing the history of female urban professionals, that is women who earned an income by working in professions such as birth attendants, beauty specialists (hairdressers, beauticians), market vendors, craftswomen (tailors, pottery makers), wedding singers and musicians, and so on. However, how to do so? The aim of this conference is to reflect together on what it is perhaps the most obvious common points that these workers shared (and still share): the silence of historiography about them; their almost total absence from national master narratives, including stories of national liberation; their lack of subjectivity as historical actors.

Argument

This conference seeks to address the problems of researching and writing the history of female urban professionals, that is women who earned an income by working in professions such as birth attendants, beauty specialists (hairdressers, beauticians), market vendors, craftswomen (tailors, pottery makers), wedding singers and musicians, and so on.

While putting in the same category very heterogenous female professions is problematic, it is possible to maintain that this has a relevant heuristic value. Comparing the histories of urban professional women in different African countries is essential for gendering the history of African labour. Indeed, the story of the migration of the (male) labour force in African cities has been broadly explored, but the consequences on women are yet to be fully understood. As the populations of cities transformed deeply with the increase in the number of women, female professions began to diversify. We need to bring back to history working women as historical agents and show their centrality in the making of the colonial and post-colonial urban fabrics.

However, how to do so? The aim of this conference is to reflect together on what it is perhaps the most obvious common points that these workers shared (and still share): the silence of historiography about them; their almost total absence from national master narratives, including stories of national liberation; their lack of subjectivity as historical actors. This silence in turn recalls another absence, that of archives. Compared to a number of political subjects which generated interminable reports - today kept in colonial and official archives - we are confronted with a scarcity of direct (textual) traces documenting the lives, the situations and the working conditions of these women.

How to address these silences is the core question of this conference. We maintain here that they can be broken through methodologies that require creativity, imagination, and courage. It is necessary to dare venturing into other disciplines (anthropology, sociology) and to mix qualitative and quantitative methodologies. It also requires to be ready to tackle and combine very different typologies of sources, which sometimes push historians out of their comfort zones. As working women are the subject of dozens of pictures in photographic archives, photography has a special place in this conference. However, other sources of great interest are represented by vernacular literature, poetry, and songs. At the same time, we must engage too with sources that are generally used by historians: statistical graphs, population censuses, health bulletins, cadastres, market minutes, and parish records. Traces of women may also be found in the rich political literature of these dense times, in trade union records, activists’ reports, and tracts written by left-wing parties, which in various parts of Africa were historically engaged with the popular classes. Last but not least, oral history, which in itself raises a host of questions related to the possibility of recovering the memory of female workers who were often stigmatized. This in turn calls into question notions such as marginality, racial and ethnic discrimination, exploitation, and sometimes slave background, and thus the writing of subaltern histories. Yet, we make the choice here to see the workers first of all as agents and actors of history, even if amidst difficult and often exploitative conditions of work.

Hence, we solicit interventions that focus on innovative and creative methodologies and reflect on the opportunities but also challenges of using different types of sources to recover, as much as possible, the lives and work experiences of urban professional women.

We would particularly welcome interventions on the relation between sources and the relation to the history of women, including but not limited to:

• Photography as a methodology
• Vernacular and popular literature (poetry, novels)
• The vernacular press
• Folk songs and music
• Quantitative sources
• Oral sources
• Diaries, biographies, family papers

This conference is part of the ERC project “Women at Work, for a comparative history of African urban professionals in four African Countries (Sudan, Ethiopia, Ghana and Tanzania) 1920-1970”, and is sponsored by the European Research Commission.

Attendance

Zoom link for the three days:

https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/96456641290?pwd=blNkWUtjWnRhV3FUclQwZS9hUDJmUT09

(passcode: 1iM7zc) 

Program

Day 1. Monday, 8th January 2024 

• 9:00 – 9:45  Welcome and presentation of the project
• 9:45 – 10:45 Noor Nieftagodien, University of Witwatersrand  South Africa, Social History and the Recovery of Women’s Experiences in History

Break

• 11:00 – 12:00  Mahassin Abdel Galil, EHESS, Paris Sudanese Women's History through Biographies and Microhistory: Implicit Methodological Challenges
• 12:00 – 13:00  Akosua Darkwah, University of Ghana The River of Life as an Interview Method

Lunch (IMAF, Bâtiment de recherches sud, 3rd floor, room n. 3.122)

• 14:30 – 15:30  Danielle Van den Heuvel, University of Amsterdam  What can the Early Modern do for You? Uncovering Ephemeral Activities on Everyday City Life using the Snapshot Method
• 15:30 – 16:30  Darren Newbury, University of Brighton Historical Photographs and Photographic Histories: Methodological Reflections on Research in Photographic Archives of Africa

Break

• 16:45 – 17:30  Karin Pallaver, University of Bologna  ERC Research Project: Ayahs in Kenya: a Preliminary Exploration of Themes and Sources

Day 2. Tuesday, 9th January 2024 

• 9:00 – 10:00  Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Utrecht University Gender Inequality and urban Elite Formation: New Insights from Parish Registers in British Colonial Africa
• 10:00 – 11:00 Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam  Searching for African Women’s Urban Occupations in Colonial Censuses: Preliminary Reflections and Comparisons

Break

• 11:15 – 12:15 Tim Gibbs, University of Paris Nanterre  The Widows of Warwick Junction Pavement Markets (Durban, South Africa): Studying Commercial Networks in a Time of Crisis
• 12:15 – 13:00 Domenico Cristofaro, University of Bologna ERC Research Project: Creative Mobilities: Introductory Thoughts on Migration, Infrastructure Development and Market Traders in Colonial Northern Ghana

Lunch (IMAF, Bâtiment de recherches sud, 3rd floor, room n. 3.122)

• 14:30 – 15:30 Salvatory Nyanto, University of Dar es Salaam  Women, Brewing and Urban Professionalism in Twentieth-Century Tabora, Western Tanzania, 1930-1970
• 15:30 – 16:15 Alma Simba, EHESS, Paris  PhD ERC Research Project: Women’s Resistance and Informal Labour in Dar es Salaam, 1950-1985

Break

• 16:30 – 17:15 Daniel Worku Kebede, EHESS, Paris PhD ERC Research Project: A History of Women in the Informal Sectors in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1886 -1991): the Case of Weavers and Potters
• 17:15 – 18:00 Juliet Tiwaah Adu Boahen, EHESS, Paris  PhD ERC Research Project: Wayside Female Dressmakers: A Historical Analysis of Cultural, Economic and Social Impacts of Dressmaking in the Gold Coast and Ghana, 1919-1970

Day 3. Wednesday, 10th January 2024 

• 9:00 – 10:00  Emma Hunter, University of Edinburgh Swahili Language Newspapers and the History of Urban Working Women in Mid-twentieth-century Tanzania
• 10:00 – 11:00 Elara Bertho, Laboratoire Afriques dans le Monde, Bordeaux Can Literature Rescue History? Paradoxes in Subalterns' Voices (Guinea, 1970s)

Break

• 11:15 – 12:15 Heather Sharkey, University of Pennsylvania ‘The Guide to Modern Cooking’: Tracing the History of Sudanese Women’s Domestic Labor Through a Home Economics Textbook
• 12:15 – 13:00 Mariam Sharif, EHESS, Paris PhD Research Project: The History of Nursing: Education, Practices and Political Participation in Sudan from 1899-1970s

Lunch (IMAF, Bâtiment de recherches sud, 3rd floor, room n. 3.023)

• 14:30 – 15:15 Anne Hugon, University of Paris 1 ERC Research Project: Documenting the History of Birth Attendants versus Documenting the History of Registered Midwives in the Gold Coast/Ghana: some Preliminary Reflections on Sources
• 15:15 – 16:00 Pierre Guidi, IRD, Paris and Tirsit Sahledengle, University of Addis Ababa   ERC Research Project: Discourses ‘From Within’ versus Discourses ‘About’? The Work of Ethiopian ‘Traditional’ Midwives in the Press and in their Own Testimonies (1970s)

Break

• 16:15 – 17:00  Elena Vezzadini, Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris ERC Research Project: Only Shadows of Traces: Studying Hairdressers and Estheticians in Colonial and Early Colonial Sudan