African Women and Apartheid

Rebekah Lee is Lecturer in the Department of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published on the social and cultural history of South Africa, and her research interests include gender and migration, religion, identity, health and material culture. She is currently engaged in a collaborative project on the history of death in Africa from c.1800 to the present day.

• TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction: Location, Method, MeaningChapter One: Mapping Cape Town’s Historical and Political Geography, 1948-2000Chapter Two: Structure and Agency in African HouseholdsChapter Three: Home Improvement, Self Improvement: Renovations and the Reconstruction of ‘Home’Chapter Four: Hearth and Home: Energy Resourcing and Consumption in an Urban EnvironmentChapter Five: Beloved Unions?: Associational Life in TownChapter Six: ‘Moving’ Memories, Urbanising Identities

'Rebekah Lee's work makes a major contribution to South African urban history, sociology and anthropology. It is a unique and sustained analysis of the experiences of African women of Cape Town. Her research techniques are particularly innovative and revealing.' - Professor William Beinart, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, 'This book offers an extraordinarily rich contribution to the historiography of African urban life in South Africa and the importance of women's creation of a home to that process. It fills a gap in urban scholarship in South Africa since the mid-1950s, extending its scope to the post-apartheid era, and complements past scholarship on women's role in public resistance and defiance by showcasing the importance of women's everyday concerns with domestic economies. This is wonderful work, presented with lots of details, and revealing many insights because of its fresh combination of historiography and ethnography. African Women and Apartheid will find eager readers among historians and anthropologists with interests in South Africa, urban studies and gender.' - - Profess Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University