Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond





Price: $39.95

Page Count: 360

Publication Date: April 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77258-228-4

Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond asks and considers: What is feminist parenting? Is it something for all parents? What does it mean to be a feminist parent in practice? The collection aims to fill a gap on feminist parenting in the existing literature by bringing timely non-Eurocentric perspectives. More specifically, the anthology’s main contribution is to broadcast reflections and experiences that emanate primarily from voices that are often overlooked in global feminist discourses: those of African women (and men), living on the continent or in the diaspora, and from others born and raised or currently living in the Global South. The 30 contributors from diverse backgrounds, walks of life and countries gathered in this anthology share powerful responses to the above questions by narrating their experiences of some of the challenges, dilemmas, promises and compromises of parenting with a feminist perspective. The volume is one of the first collections that collates first-person essays that describe the authors’ touching, beautiful and sometimes painful journeys of becoming feminist parents. In doing so, the authors of this book aim at (re)claiming parenting as a necessarily political terrain for sub-version, radical transformation and resistance to patriarchal oppression and sexism.

“ With this moving collection, Rama Salla Dieng and Andrea O’Reilly manage to assemble diverse voices in a stirring, necessary and powerful feminist reclamation of the historically invisibilised labour of mothering and parenting. The essays cut across racial, gender, queer, and geographical difference, raising difficult questions regarding what it means to parent as a feminist, and how feminism shapes our experiences and aspirations of parenting. The narratives are beautifully told and deeply personal, and the questions they raise, myriad. The realizations of longing, sacrifice, solidarity, love, compromise, intimacy, guilt, despondency, triumph and joy that these stories reveal will be familiar to every feminist.”

—DR. LYN OSSOME, Senior Research Fellow, Makerere Institute of Social Research, Uganda

“ Who and how to be a feminist parent in Africa and beyond?” To these questions, Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond gives several answers or rather offers perspectives anchored in places and contexts which reflect intimate, sociocultural, religious, political, and personal representations. What makes this book original and rich are the confrontations and connections between analyses of family and parenting through a feminist lens. The contributions have led the authors to reconsider the meaning of feminism in Africa, its theories and practices in this very beautiful anthology.

—DR FATOU SOW, Professor of Sociology, National Center for Scientific Research (France) / Cheikh Anta Diop University (Senegal)

“This moving and insightful collection opens up diverse visions and practices of feminist parenting, bringing together authors of different locations and generations in reflection and analysis. It’s a vivid reminder of how in interweaving the personal and political, feminist scholarship transforms our understandings of self, society and others." 

—Professor Andrea Cornwall, Anthropologist and Pro-Director (Research & Enterprise), SOAS University of London

"Feminist Parenting is unique and profound anthology by heterodox feminist parents. It is a wide-ranging, ground-breaking work which creatively links parenting and feminism. I having nothing but praises for this archiving and documentation of personal and individual voices of feminist parents."

—Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Research Professor and Director of Scholarship in the Department of Leadership and Transformation in the Principal and Vice-Chancellor’s Office at the University of South Africa.

This timely collection of personal narratives provides refreshing perspectives on the experiences of feminist mothers, feminist fathers and those of their children. Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond offers amazing new ways in theory and method. It transcends mainstream theorising about feminist parenting through a focus on African and wider Global South feminisms. The personal narratives are a powerful way of tracing non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge transmission in an open dialogue of different generations. This book is vital reading for anyone interested in the new waves of feminist politics that have arisen across the African continent and beyond.

—Heike Becker, Professor of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
Author of Namibian Women's Movement 1980 to 1992. From Anticolonial Struggle to Reconstruction.

How might feminists bring up their children to question gender stereotypes and nudge them to adopt more egalitarian views of gender? In a thought-provoking and powerful collection, feminists document their struggles to do this. That this comes mainly out of reflections from African writers on gendered Africa in all its diversity is itself novel and provocative. The passionate accounts of personal experience are compelling, especially as they acknowledge the resistance of children to perspectives which contradict their peer groups’ unquestioned essentialist assumptions. The potential for family tensions is also fascinatingly exposed as mothers and fathers disagree on how far to go, even where men are sympathetic to feminist ideas. Aspects of these universal stories will speak to all of us and give courage to feminists to persevere.

—Janet Bujra, Review of African Political Economy Editorial Working Group and Honorary Reader, Peace Studies, University of Bradford

Acknowledgements
3
Introduction
Rama Salla Dieng
11
Part I
Feminist Mothering Journeys
45
Chapter 1
Mothering Malaika: Thoughts on Feminist Mothering
Cheryl Hendricks and Malaika Eyoh
47
Chapter 2
There Is No One Way to Be a Parent
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
55
Chapter 3
Intuitive Feminist Parenting
Jael Silliman
61
Chapter 4
Feminist Parenting: A Memoir in Motion
Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey
73
Chapter 5
Colouring Outside the Binary:
Challenging the Imposition of Gender Binaries on Toddlers
Neela Ghoshal
87
Chapter 6
Becoming an African Feminist Parent
Satang Nabaneh
99
Chapter 7
A Muslim Feminist Mother
Astou Ka
107
Chapter 8
Parenting across Cultures, Continents, and Generations
Kathryn Toure
113
Chapter 9
“A Young Woman’s Voice Does Not Break, It Grows Firmer”
Rama Salla Dieng
123
Chapter 10
Feminist Parenting from the Lens of a Muslim Woman
Kula Fofana
149
Part II
Parenting Is Political:
Of Feminist Mothers’ Struggles and Resistance
161
Chapter 11
The Necessity of Rage and the Politics of Feminist Parenting
Masana Ndinga-Kanga
163
Chapter 12
Growing into Motherhood
Sadaf Khan
177
Chapter 13
Thinking and Practicing Parenting;
or How to Do Right by My Child … and Me?
Elena Damma
189
Chapter 14
It Takes a Village, as Long as You Have One
OluTimehin Adegbeye
203
Chapter 15
Feminism, Mothering, and Choice
Angelica Sorel
213
Chapter 16
Feminist Parenting: No Rock, No Egg!
Toucouleur
229
Chapter 17
Liberating One’s Self:
Healing and Helping Others Do the Same
Joanna Grace Farmer
237
Chapter 18
“Just Wait until They Go to School”:
Autonomy, Identity, and Feminist Parenting in an
Imperfect Society
Danya Long
251
Chapter 19
Sidestepping the Patriarchy:
Creating in Our Children a Critical Feminist Consciousness
Sehin Teferra
265
Chapter 20
Mother of Two: Reflections on Love and Loss
Nikki Petersen
271
Chapter 21
From Dreams to Action:
Creating My Own Happily Ever After by
Choosing to Adopt as a Young, Single Woman
Astrid Rosemary Ndagano Haas
279
Chapter 22
Feminism and Ecology:
A Complicated, Questionable Equation?
Elisabeth
289
Chapter 23
Why I Have Decided Not to Parent
(and Why I Won’t regret It)
Elizabeth Wright Veintimilla
301
Part III
Contributions from African Feminist Fathers and Children
307
Chapter 24
What My Mom and My Daughter Taught Me
Cheikh “Keyti” Séne
309
Chapter 25
Feminists Opened My Eyes
Oliver Ngweno
317
Chapter 26
The Struggling Feminists
Ousmane Diop
321
Chapter 27
“Work Hard for Your Little Girl” and
Other Dilemmas of Feminist Tightrope Walkers
Alioune ‘Papa’
327
Chapter 28
Lessons on Feminist Parenting from My Nonfeminist Mother
Françoise Kpeglo Moudouthe
331
Afterword
Andrea O’Reilly
335
Notes on Contributors
349

Rama Salla Dieng BIO

Rama Salla Dieng, PhD, is a Senegalese scholar and writer. She is a Lecturer at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, and a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships of the same university. Rama is the Programme Director for the MSc Africa and International Development and her research focuses on African feminisms, feminist political economy, agrarian studies and gender and development in Africa. She currently serves on the Council of Development Studies Association UK, and convenes the Decolonising Development Study Group. Between 2010 and 2015, she worked at the Policy Research Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa's Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) in Senegal. Rama has published a novel La Dernière Lettre with Présence Africaine in 2008. She has contributed to an Edited volume by Gender Links on Polygamy: At the heart of the Matter (2009), and an edited volume on Democracy and Development: Perspectives of Young African Researchers (2013) published by l'Harmattan. She holds a PhD and a MSc in International Development from SOAS, University of London and a Master in International Cooperation from Sciences Po Bordeaux, France.

Andrea O’Reilly BIO

Andrea O’Reilly, PhD, is a full professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, founder/ editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and publisher of Demeter Press. She is co-editor/editor of twenty books including Feminist Perspectives on Young Mothers and Mothering (2019). O’Reilly is also the author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (2004); Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering (2006); and Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice (2016). She is editor of the Encyclopedia on Motherhood (2010) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Motherhood (2019). She has presented hear research at over one hundred conferences and has authored eighty articles and chapters. She is twice the recipient of York University’s “Professor of the Year Award” for teaching excellence and is the 2019 recipient of the Status of Women and Equity Award of Distinction from OCUFA (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations).