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Drawing on communications rescued from the shredders in the last days of Rhodesia, enlivened by photographs and memories both her own and those of her colleagues Maia Chenaux-Repond tells the story of her work as the Provincial Community Developpment Officer (Women) for Mashonaland and South in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the 1970s. There are no records whatsoever in the National Archives of Zimbabwe about the Community Development Section (Women), even though it was active in all the provinces. In the absence of other documentary sources, and all other provincial officers long having emigrated or died, this account of her work fills a significant gap in the pre-independence history of Zimbabwe. he crucial focus of the Womens Section on improving the lives and skills of women in the rural areas became progressively more difficult when the civil war intensified from the early 1970 as rural people and the development workers themselves were moved into Protected Villages, and as the Ministry became increasingly militarized.
Drawing on communications ‘rescued’ from the shredders in the last days of Rhodesia, enlivened by photographs and memories - both her own and those of her colleagues - Maia Chenaux-Repond tells the story of her work as the Provincial Community Development Officer (Women) for Mashonaland and South in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the 1970s. There are no records whatsoever in the National Archives of Zimbabwe about the Community Development Section (Women), even though it was active in all the provinces. In the absence of other documentary sources, and all other provincial officers long having emigrated or died, this account of her work fills a significant gap in the pre-independence history of Zimbabwe. The crucial focus of the Women’s Section on improving the lives and skills of women in the rural areas became progressively more difficult when the civil war intensified from the early 1970 as rural people - and the development workers themselves - were moved into ‘Protected Villages’, and as the Ministry became increasingly militarized.
In Elasticity in Domesticity: White women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890-1979 Ushehwedu Kufakurinani examines the colonial experiences of white women in what was later called Rhodesia. He demonstrates the extent to which the state and society appropriated white women’s labour power and the workings of the domestic ideology in shaping white women’s experiences. The author also discusses how and to what extent white women appropriated and deployed the domestic ideology. Institutional as well as personal archives were consulted which include official correspondence, diaries, personal letters, newsletters, magazines, commissions of inquiry, among other sources.
This book demonstrates the place of womens movements during a defining period of contemporary Zimbabwe. The government of Robert Mugabe may have been as firmly in power in 2000 as it was in 1995, but the intervening years saw severe economic crisis, mass strikes and protests, the start of land occupations, intervention in the war in the DRC, and the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Shereen Essof shows how Zimbabwean women crafted responses to these and other events, and aimed for a feminist agenda that would prioritise the interests of the rural and urban poor. Rejecting both the strictures of patriarchy and the orthodoxies of established feminism, she demands that Zimbabwes women be heard in their own voices and in their own contexts. In doing so she writes a book that combines scholarly integrity with a wild, joyous cry for liberation.
This is a review of where the women of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean stand on key social and cultural issues. What progress have women in particular countries made? How do social pressures, cultural expectations and continuing poverty hold back effective recognition of their rights? What prospects, as a result of continuing research, activism by women's organizations and measures by government, does the next generation hold out of for further progress in women's social position?