shopping_cart
Ohio University Press · Swallow Press · www.ohioswallow.com

A Ohio University Press Book

Negotiating Power and Privilege
Career Igbo Women in Contemporary Nigeria

By Philomina E. Okeke-Ihejirika

“The intellectual success of this study is not that it yields generalizations about the role of education, neatly packaged and ready for uncritical international application to African women or Third World women at large. Rather, this study generates widely applicable questions and identifies issues that are likely to shape the direction of research on women's education and employment for years to come.”

Gracia Clark, author of Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women

Even with a university education, the Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria face obstacles that prevent them from reaching their professional and personal potentials. Negotiating Power and Privilege is a study of their life choices and the embedded patriarchy and other obstacles in postcolonial Africa barring them from fulfillment.

Philomina E. Okeke recorded life-history interviews and discussions during the 1990s with educated women of differing ages and professions. Her interviews expose both familiar and surprising aspects of the women’s experience—their victories and compromise—within their families, marriages, and workplaces. Okeke explores the many factors that have shaped women’s access to sponsorship and promotion in their quest to join men as partners in nation building.

Negotiating Power and Privilege captures the voices of African female professionals and vividly portrays the women’s continuous negotiation as wives, mothers, single women, and workers. It shows the inherent limitations of contemporary policies in developing nations that often prescribe secondary and advanced education for women as a panacea for every social ill. It is also an original and important contribution to African studies, gender studies, development studies, education policy, and sociology. This engagingly written book will appeal to a wide audience, ranging from undergraduate students to scholars and professionals.

Philomina E. Okeke-Ihejirika is an assistant professor of women's studies at the University of Alberta. Her current research involves economic barriers to black immigrant women's empowerment in Edmonton, Alberta.   More info →

Order a print copy

Paperback · $26.36 ·
Add to Cart

Retail price: $32.95 · Save 20% ($26.36)

Buy from a local bookstore

IndieBound

US and Canada only

Buy an eBook

Amazon Kindle Store Barnes & Noble NOOK Google Play iBooks Store

Availability and price vary according to vendor.

Cover of Negotiating Power and Privilege

Share    Facebook icon  Email icon

Requests

To request instructor exam/desk copies, email Jeff Kallet at kallet@ohio.edu.

To request media review copies, email Laura Andre at andrel@ohio.edu.

Permission to reprint
Permission to photocopy or include in a course pack via Copyright Clearance Center

Formats

Paperback
978-0-89680-241-4
Retail price: $32.95, S.
Release date: November 2004
280 pages
Rights:  World

Electronic
978-0-89680-438-8
Release date: November 2004
280 pages
Rights:  World

Related Titles

Cover of 'Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State'

Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State
By Simeon O. Ilesanmi

In the case of Nigeria, scholarship on religious politics has not adequately taken into account the pluralistic context and the idealistic pretensions of the state that inhibit the possibility of forging an enduring civic amity among Nigeria’s diverse groups. Ilesanmi proposes a new philosophy or model of religio-political interaction, which he calls dialogic politics.

Religion | Religion, Politics & State · Nigeria · African Studies

Cover of 'Colonial Meltdown'

Colonial Meltdown
Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
By Moses E. Ochonu

Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression.

History | Africa | West · History | Modern | General · Colonialism and Decolonization · Nigeria · Western Africa · Africa · African Studies · Great Depression