IN PRINT

    Over the centuries, African women have ruled nations, raised families, owned land, farmed, and served as priestesses and healers. Simultaneously, they have been subjected to discrimination, sexually harassed - and frequently ignored - despite the important roles they play in African society.
    A new book by UAlbany Department of History Professor Iris Berger and co-author E. Frances White explores the paradoxes of their lives. Titled Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (1999, Indiana University Press, $12.95), the work is one of four volumes of the Restoring Women to History series. (The others deal with women in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa.)
    The second part of the book, written by White, concentrates on women in west and west-central Africa. In Part I, Berger focuses on the contributions women in eastern and southern Africa have made to their families and their nations. From antiquity through the 20th century, she details the often intricate familial interrelationships, rural and urban customs, religious beliefs, mores, and laws that at times limited women economically and socially - and relegated them to the status of second-class citizens - but also allocated power to some women. 
    During the 19th century, for example, Berger notes: “Women in most societies remained central to production, trade, and other economic pursuits and had considerable autonomy in controlling the products of their labor. In centralized kingdoms, queen mothers and members of royal families wielded significant power and authority. As healers, priestesses, and spirit mediums, other women addressed individual and communal afflictions, while older women directed life-cycle rituals for girls that helped to create cohesion in values and institutions. Substantial variation remained, however, in the levels of women's political and legal authority and in the degree of submissiveness and deference demanded of them. Furthermore, where the influence of European missionaries, settlers, and traders was increasing, the ensuing changes in economic, political, and religious life were disrupting established relationships in profound, sometimes disturbing ways.”
    According to Berger, “Poverty and detachment from kin were particularly detrimental to women.” In the 19th-century Sudan, for example, “the incidence of slave raids and slavery rose dramatically. Mainly women, these slaves became concubines and agricultural and domestic laborers in Muslim areas of the north. In response to the dislocations of the slave trade, some African women moved to urban areas and took up new occupations.” Among the occupations commonly available to women in cities were beer brewer, factory worker, housekeeper - and prostitute.
    Often, African women enjoyed some privileges and freedoms but were restricted in other ways.  Amhara women of Ethiopia “owned, plowed, planted, and harvested their own fields,” but laws limited their equality with men; in other societies, women could own land but not cattle, which were a highly valued form of wealth. The entire community regarded male elders as authority figures, while women elders, in many cases, had influence only over younger females. In many instances, women were subject to fathers or husbands throughout their lives. 
    During the period of formal colonialism in the 20th century, the implications of change remained complex. Writing on rural areas in the interwar period, the author notes that women's positions “continued to vary, depending on a number of factors: the effects of cash crops, technology, and changing patterns of land tenure; the demands of white settlers; and women's previous economic position.”
     For Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, Berger drew, in part, upon her years of experience in the three disciplines in which she teaches: history, women's studies, and Africana studies. At the time she graduated from the University of Michigan, she recalls, “many African countries had just become independent from colonial rule, and there was excitement about that. So I decided to go to Kenya. I taught English and history at a girls' school there for two years. But the history being taught was still very much colonial history, a history of European expansion.” 
    Fascinated by Kenya, its culture, and its people, Berger enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, “which probably had the best African history program in the country at that time.” Combining her interests in Africa and women's studies - the latter an emerging field in the 1960s - Berger traveled to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and western Tanzania to do research for her dissertation. “My research focus shifted to southern Africa later,” she adds.
    As noted in her latest work, Berger, who returns to Africa every few years, learned that African women “were marginalized, in many respects. Even when colonial governments started paying more attention to agricultural development in the 1950s, they would send agricultural agents to rural areas to work with male farmers on growing cash crops, overlooking the fact that women were the primary food growers and providers.” Her findings also “contradict some of the pre-conceived notions about Muslim women”: “In East Africa, women were not initially veiled or secluded. Those customs developed later in response to new class divisions in society, rather than from Islamic dictates. And in coastal society, women in arranged marriages often divorce and go off to marry whom they want.”
     Asked if the women of one African nation seem to have progressed more than any of the others, Berger cites those of South Africa. “Since the 1994 elections,” she comments, “there has been greater gender equality. South Africa has an amazing new constitution that guarantees equality. It states that there should be no discrimination on grounds of race, gender, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation - things that are not written into most constitutions. Also, since 1994, women have made up a quarter of the new South African parliament. There is a 'gender desk' in each ministry of the government so that women's concerns are represented. For instance, the Ministry of Land Affairs' 'gender desk' tries to ensure that women are given equal rights to own redistributed land.”
    Berger, whose next project will be a cultural history of urbanization, gender, and modernity in South Africa, says her work is a vital part of the history department's gender and society track. “The history graduate program at Albany and the new M.A. program in women's studies are really unique because we have people doing history of women and gender from so many different world areas,” she explains. “My colleagues' work on women's studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Russia, China, and other parts of the world, as well as the United States, gives Albany's curriculum a unique strength.”

    A Long Island native interested in law and education is the first recipient of the University at Albany's Stanley Fink Internship.
    Jonathan Estreich, a 20-year-old junior from New Hyde Park, will spend the Spring 2000 semester working in the New York State Assembly. In addition to working as an intern with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the American history major will receive a $5,000 stipend.
    Estreich is enthusiastic about the opportunity the award presents. “I've always been interested in politics,” he noted. “The internship will give me a firsthand opportunity to learn how politics works on both the state and local levels.” 
    A Presidential Scholar, Estreich worked last summer as a volunteer in the Hempstead office of his Congresswoman, Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY-4th). In that role, he recalled, “I aided the general staff, who primarily assisted constituents in working out problems with government agencies.” The Fink internship, however, will enable him “to see how Assembly members interact,” observed Estreich, who also directs the Presidential Honors Society's academic services program and serves as sports editor for the campus publication The Student Voice. 
    Aside from his experience with Congresswoman McCarthy's office and the Presidential Honors Society, Estreich has found another outlet for service to others. The UAlbany liaison to the SUNY Assembly was recently elected by students at the other three SUNY centers (Buffalo, Stony Brook, and Binghamton) to represent their interests to the State University Board of Trustees, as well.
    Every year, the University at Albany sends 60 to 80 interns to the New York State Assembly and Senate - “the largest number from any institution in the state,” according to Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Studies Ivan Edelson. The Stanley Fink Internship “will be an extension of that commitment to public service and recall the former Assembly speaker's leadership,” Edelson explained. He added that the internship entails “a full 15-credit semester academic component, with each intern assigned to an Assembly person for the entire semester.”
    The Undergraduate Academic Council's Interdisciplinary Studies Committee reviewed the applications and selected Estreich from an “outstanding” field of candidates, said Edelson, who administers the internship. Applicants must meet requirements for Dean's List standing and have earned at least 56 academic credits at UAlbany. 
     Funded by a $100,000 grant from the Bell Atlantic Foundation, the Stanley Fink Internship memorializes the late Assembly speaker, who was also a former senior executive with Bell Atlantic's predecessor company, NYNEX.