Women In African Parliaments

Working together across religious, ethnic, and class divisions, African women are helping to formulate legislation and foster democracies more inclusive of women's interests. Women in African Parliaments explores this phenomenon, examining the impact and experiences of African women as they seek increased representation in national legislatures. The authors' carefully constructed case studies allow cross-national comparisons of the range of strategies that African women have used to achieve greater involvement in national politics. A unique feature of the work is the voices of African women themselves, who explain how they achieved or continue to fight for electoral success, how they learned to work with lifelong adversaries, and how they have begun to transform their parliaments.

Although the international press closely chronicled the dismantling of South Africa's apartheid policies, it paid little attention to the unique role women from a variety of political parties played in establishing the new government. Utilizing interviews, participant observation, and archival research, Women in the South African Parliament tells an inspiring story of liberation, showing how these women achieved electoral success, learned to work with lifelong enemies, and began to transform Parliament by creating more space for women's voices during a critical time in the life of their democracy. Arguing from her detailed analysis of the strategies and political tactics used by these South African women, both individually and collectively, Hannah Britton contends that, contrary claims in earlier studies of the developing world, mobilization by women prior to a transition to democracy can lead to gains after the transition--including improvements in constitutional mandates, party politics, and representation. At the same time, Britton demonstrates that not even national leadership can ensure power for all women and that many who were elected to South Africa's first democratic parliament declined to run again, feeling they could have a greater impact working in their own communities.

Women burst onto the political scene in Africa after the 1990s, claiming more than one third of the parliamentary seats in countries like Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi. Women in Rwanda hold the highest percentage of legislative seats in the world. Women's movements lobbied for constitutional reforms and new legislation to expand women's rights. This book examines the convergence of factors behind these dramatic developments, including the emergence of autonomous women's movements, changes in international and regional norms regarding women's rights and representation, the availability of new resources to advance women's status, and the end of civil conflict. The book focuses on the cases of Cameroon, Uganda, and Mozambique, situating these countries in the broader African context. The authors provide a fascinating analysis of the way in which women are transforming the political landscape in Africa, by bringing to bear their unique perspectives as scholars who have also been parliamentarians, transnational activists, and leaders in these movements.

This book offers in-depth analysis of parliamentary development set in a historical context informed by Africa's post-1990s democratic resurgence. In particular, it illustrates how African parliaments are caught between the twin processes of being part of the machinery of government while exercising the function of holding government accountable.

Whatever other shortcomings of representative democracy may be apparent in our world today, one issue that clearly remains only partially resolved is the participation and policy impact of one half of the population--women. This comparative study examines this issue in the context of two African countries, South Africa and Uganda, both of which have accomplished much more at the level of women's political participation than most African or indeed other countries.

This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

"Focuses on women in elected or appointed national government positions. An extensive analysis of the progress made by women leaders in each individual country, and overall analysis of the historical role of women in African governments. In-depth profiles of women in high-office positions, including Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Mozambique Prime Minister Luisa Diogo"--Provided by publisher.