“ 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