Stephanie S. Starling. Navigating Womanhood in Contemporary Botswana. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. vii + 187 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.95. Paper. ISBN: 9781350356726.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Stephanie Starling engaged in extensive interviews and discussions with thirty Tswana women about their understanding of what womanhood means to them, and how they experience their current situation.She drew on contacts she had made over several years of residence and work in Botswana to reach women who consented to discuss the details of their personal lives.The results are both informative and discouraging and corroborate similar reports about women's lives around the world.Starling frequently compares her findings with Isaac Schapera's early work in Botswana to demonstrate the continuing restrictions on women (A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom [LIT Verlag, 1938], and Married Life in an African Tribe [Penguin, 1940]).The book begins with an epigraph that sets a major theme of the book: "That's how it is here.Men do what they want" (1).Two introductory chapters give a brief overview and discuss the theoretical and methodological context of her research.She then analyzes the idea of "womanhood," and how her interlocutors understand the expectations of adult women's lives.Marriage emerges as the central probability for all women, with pressure from close family members and society at large to marry and remain married, with the accompanying goal of having children.Not all of her respondents were married, and at least a couple of them expected to remain unmarried while pursuing their careers, but all had experienced comments and criticisms about their marital status.Much of the rest of the book details how the limited view of women's lives has meant real restrictions for women who for the most part lived in the capital, Gaborone, though rural women also felt that insistence on marriage and motherhood.Starling interweaves the stories of the women in the study with information from earlier work in Botswana and similar research on women in other African nations, as well as statistical information about women and work and education.The picture that surfaces is one of limited progress despite some legal advances.The testimony was mainly from women striving to work to earn an income, usually as single mothers, while meeting other kin obligations in order to fulfill family requirements.Some urban women regularly traveled to rural family homes on weekends to participate in celebrations and gatherings there.The absence of husbands and fathers was a recurring theme, similar to reports by Schapera in the 1930s.In more recent years the percentage of children born to single mothers has risen from 76 percent in 2011 to 84 percent in 2019, a
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2025.21
Author: Kathleen Sheldon
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407828940