1. Seeking Gendered Perspectives jeanne marie penvenne

2. Photo credit Carlos Domingues

3. Seeking Gendered Perspectives Three Modules
Module One:
Seeking Gendered Perspectives: Matimu & I Khale
Module Two:
The Order in Disorder: The Problem with Seeing Like a State
Module Three:
The Challenges of Writing: Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy of Southern Mozambique,

4. Mozambique & S’rn Mozambique

5. Colonial s’rn Mozambique Labor history, 1870’s – 1970’s

6. Unanticipated & Unnoticed “Industrial Woman”

7. Modules 1 & 2 Chronology of Epiphanies Building on and with others
Personal expedition as an historian, … Cambridge Dictionary: “…a moment when you suddenly feel that you understand, or suddenly become conscious of, something that is very important to you.” epiphany

8. Magude District Southern Mozambique

9. I khale Field Research, Magude, Mid-1990s Matimu
Heidi Gengenbach The History of Magude District Mozambique through women’s experience Matimu & I Khale
Field Research, Magude, Mid-1990s
Matimu
Ronga word for history
Men’s business – Not women’s business
I khale
Back then in time….
Naming, body markings, pottery, marriages …
Contrasting Understandings of History

10. Camaradas de Sul do Save Sherilynn Young, José Fialho Feliciano & Ana Loforte,
Young, “ Fertility & Famine: Women’s Agriculture in Southern Mozambique” (1977) - Women’s voices in rain prayers and song Fialho Feliciano, Antropologia Económica dos Thonga do Sul de Moçambique (1998) -Women navigate lineage claims / household and gift economies Loforte, Género e Poder entre os Tsonga de Moçambique (2000) - Women quickly learn power landscapes / relationships /competition among women/ Matrikin and Haháni

11. Camaradas de sul do save Alpheus Manghezi Benigna Zimba
Manghezi, Macassane…Entrevistas e Canções and many others. ( )
Extensive collection and analysis of songs and oral narratives.
Zimba, Mulheres Invisíveis: Género e Políticas Comerciais no Sul de Moçambique, 1720 – 1830 (2003)
Women’s labor and management in the household and gift economy as essential to men’s development of commercial success in the 18th century.

12. Silences, Shadows Jacques Depelchin, Historian / Activist
“…even as I am attempting to unveil silences, I will be reproducing others.”
Silences in African History…(2005)
Sabrina Gschwandtner, Artist / Activist
“Whenever you shed light on something you also make a shadow.”
Quote posted with her Breaking Amish Film Quilt,Boston Contemporary Art Gallery (2016)

13. Quest for Gendered Perspectives in the academy and in development Archives & Field work – 9 markers
Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970) Nazneen Kanje, et al. New Edition & Introduction (2007) Martin Chanock, “Making Customary Law…” (1982) Leroy Vail & Landeg White, “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique.” (1983) Susan Geiger, “What’s so Feminist about Doing Women’s Oral History“ (1992)

14. Seeking Gendered Perspectives
Tiyambe Zeleza, “Gender Biases in African Historiography” Engendering African Social Sciences, Imam, Mama, Sow, (1997)
Jan Bender Shetler,” Gendered Spaces of Historical Knowledge: Women’s Knowledge and Extraordinary Women in the Serengeti District, Tanzania,” (2003)
Derek Peterson & Giacomo Macola, Recasting the Past; History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (2009)

15. Layered insights Boserup & Chanock
Boserup - The farmer SHE…..
Credentialed economist gets power circles to pay attention to gender and women’s ability to claim land and resources for agricultural production. (1970)
Chanock – The Making of Customary Law
Colonial Codification of “Customary Law”
Households as sites of contestation and production
Male FIX on Women & Children’s FLUID
Codification Eclipses Contestation
Government and Mission Archival Records Strongly Andro- centric / Eclipses Women’s Perspectives in Historical Record

16. Vail & White Song and Performance as Historical archive
"The Possession of the Dispossessed - Songs as History among Tumbuka Women”
The corpus of songs performed by Central African women in vimbuza, spirit possession rituals, "...constitute a specific reading by women of Tumbuka history ....with particular concern for changing relations between men and women within the context of the household."
Emphasis on vernacular languages & the cultural protections of the performance space

17. Vail & White European & African male “Truths” Hollow for women
"...women have insisted on maintaining vimbuza because it has been one of the few places where they could express their view of what the area's history was all about. Rejecting the optimistic views of European missionaries about the value of 'progress,' and finding little comfort in the ethnic boastings of local men, women have used vimbuza as their own public voice"

18. Geiger – Feminist Scholarship
1. Presuppose gender as a central analytical concept
2. Generate the problematic from the study of women as embodying and creating historically and situationally specific economic, social, cultural, national and racial / ethnic realities
3. Serve as a corrective for androcentric notions and assumptions about what is normal by establishing or contributing to new knowledge for understanding women’s lives and the gendered elements of the broader social world.
4. Accept women’s own interpretations of their identities, experiences and social worlds as containing and reflecting important truths.
5. Do not categorize / dismiss those truths as simply subjective, any more than one would dismiss men’s truths as simply subjective.

19. Tiyambe Zeleza Tiyambe Zeleza (1997)
"Gender history cannot go far without the continuous retrieval of women's history; while women's history can not transform the fundamentally flawed paradigmatic bases of 'mainstream' history without gender history. [Historians must]… understand women for their own sake [and]… understand our shared, but varied and diverse and unequal historical experiences and relations as human beings.”
Academic Tensions / Women’s Studies / Gender Studies / Sexualilty / Masculinities

20. Jan Bender-Shetler Imagining Serengeti (2007)
Bender Shetler Echoes Gengenbach
“…women possessed not just another version but wholly different kinds of knowledge about the past…men and women share neither styles of oral narration nor types of knowledge about the past. Men and women occupy separate spheres in their daily routines, sharing the same world but participating in different, though intersecting, sets of discourses about that world… A gendered analysis of oral tradition is necessary for finding its historical meaning.”

21. Derek Peterson & Giacoma Macola Homespun History & Patriarchy
Peterson & Macola parallel with Chanock
Vernacular histories written by lineage leaders
Mission educated literate men. Early political leaders
Ethnicity, lineage authority and specific claims regarding age and gender
Histories assert male authority and they describe the “proper” behavior of women and youths
Wives defer to husbands / Youths defer to elders

22. José Capela Moçambique pelo seu povo
Cartas de Voz Africana
(Porto: Afrontamento, 1971)
Relações Clânicas
Moral Clânica
O Clâ e a Familia
Pâtria Ocupada
“essas mulheres”

23. MATIMU & I KHALE
It is not just a matter of the wrong word / translation.
Archives & Field / Vernacular & Performance
Women’s ways of knowing, telling and experiencing history remain under-researched, under-theorized and under- embedded in what we convey as knowledge & expertise.
Gendered Perspectives - Men & Women
Contestations – Households & Stakes Claiming
Conveying Perspectives
Where do we look, how do we understand?
Scholarship, the Secular & the Sacred

24. Economic, political, social & spiritual
What is work and who does it?
What do women consider “political” ?
Which contested arenas do women find worth entering?
What kinds of “social” investments do women make and why?
Spiritual arenas with economic, political and social implications – so much work still to do.

25. Sara S. Berry Social Work: Entrepreneurial Labor in the 20th century
The International Labour Organization’s General Labour History of Africa in the Twentieth Century, ( in process…2017/ 2018)
“social work – creating and managing relationships with a variety of other people to gain access to markets and resources, direct and coordinate processes of production, and keep the enterprise going in good times and bad.”
Unpaid family members, clients, reciprocity, reputation
Berry’s case study largely men, but echoes Fialho Feliciano’s insights regarding women in southern Mozambique.

26. Gender & the Spiritual Realm Marc Epprecht, James Pfeiffer, Linda van de Kamp
“This matter of women is getting very bad:” gender, development and politics in colonial Lesotho. (2000) Basotho Women's Pious Associations
Male political and church leaders consider women’s associations: "irrationality," "other-worldly," “escapism,” “stubborn obsessions,” “lack of reason,” and tendencies toward the "bizarre."
Epprecht: “ provide a sense of direction, accomplishment and pride for Basotho women in what was an otherwise demoralizing and deteriorating socio-economic setting."
Vail & White: "through vimbuza, deprived and marginalized women have been able to exercise at least a measure of autonomy and power in an otherwise desperate situation.”
James Pfeiffer & Linda van de Kamp Pentecostalism in Mozambique

27. change through gendered Perspectives
In we remain in the discourse and analyses of Matimu women will not participate
If we want to forge meaningful change we must recognize, tap into and support women’s ways and their work

28. With Independence Greater attention to women and work

29. women & the Law in Southern Africa [WLSA]
WLSA Scholarly Collaborative:
Conceição Osório, Teresa Cruz e Silva, Maria José Artur, Terezinha da Silva, Ana Loforte and many others
Research Rights / Stakes Claiming – Rewind Chanock
Women’s Strategies & Legal Status
Attention to food, shelter & violence

30. Stephanie Urdang, And Still They Dance (1989)
Women in Politics & nationalist movements & organization of Mozambican women
Stephanie Urdang, And Still They Dance (1989)
Alda Saúte Saide, “As Mulheres e a Luta de Libertação Nacional,” (2014)
Benigna Zimba, OMM, A Mulher Moçambicana na Luta de Libertação Nacional, Memórias do Destacamento Feminino, 2012.
Isabel Casimiro, “Paz na terra, guerra em casa”:Feminismo e Organizações de mulheres em Moçambique

31. A luta continua