Making modern girls : a history of girlhood, labor, and social development in Colonial Lagos / Abosede A. George.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

George, Abosede A., author.

Series:

New African histories series

New African histories

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Girls--Nigeria--Lagos--History--20th century.

Girls.

Child labor--Nigeria--Lagos--History--20th century.

Child labor.

Peddlers--Nigeria--Lagos--History--20th century.

Peddlers.

Public welfare--Nigeria--Lagos--History--20th century.

Public welfare.

Social change--Nigeria--Lagos.

Social change.

History.

Lagos (Nigeria)--Social conditions--20th century.

Lagos (Nigeria).

Great Britain--Colonies--Social policy.

Great Britain.

Colonies.

Social policy.

Nigeria--Lagos.

Physical Description:

x, 301 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2014]

Summary:

In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. She draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s. Two major schemes are at the center of this study: the modernization project of elite Lagosian women and the Salvationist project of British social workers. By approaching children and youth, specifically girl hawkers, as social actors and examining the ways in which local and colonial reformers worked upon young people, the book offers a critical new perspective on the uses of African children for the production and legitimization of national and international social development initiatives. Making Modern Girls demonstrates how oral sources can be used to uncover the social history of informal or undocumented urban workers and to track transformations in practices of childhood over the course of decades. George revises conventional accounts of the history of development work in Africa by drawing close attention to the social welfare initiatives of late colonialism and by highlighting the roles that African women reformers played in promoting socio-cultural changes within their own societies. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Girling the subject

1. Working well: gender, status, and social reform among educated elite women in colonial Lagos, 1900/1920

2. Making the modern child in the era of imperial liberalism

3. Setting up the welfare city: prelude to the Children and Young Person's Ordinance of 1943

4. The street hawker, the street walker, and the salvationist gaze

5. Problem girls, private vice, and public secrets in Lagos

6. Delinquents to breadwinners and hawkers to homemakers: gender, juvenile justice, and reform in the welfare city

7. For women, girls, and the nation? the politics of girl saving in the era of anticolonial nationalism

Conclusion: banning hawkers sixty years later.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-293) and index.

ISBN:

9780821421154

0821421158

9780821421161

0821421166

OCLC:

880966158