"Women have played a far more central role in Africa than the history books often suggest. Here are lively portraits of twelve key figures. Their periods of influence range from ancient Egypt to the colonial era. This book offers informative reading for secondary school and university students not only in Africa, but in the rest of the world. It will also have an appeal to the general audience interested in the role of women in history." -- Back cover.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Meet the little leaders. They're brave. They're bold. They changed the world. Featuring 40 trailblazing black women in history, this book educates and inspires as it relates true stories of women who broke boundaries and exceeded all expectations, including: Nurse Mary Seacole Politician Diane Abbott Mathematician Katherine Johnson Singer Shirley Bassey Bestselling author and artist Vashti Harrison pairs captivating text and beautiful illustrations as she tells the stories of both iconic and lesser-known female figures. Among these biographies, readers will find heroes, role models, and everyday women who did extraordinary things.

This book examines women and leadership in West Africa, with a special focus on Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—the Mano River Union countries. These countries have traditions of indigenous female leadership in executive positions in varying degrees, and all three have a tradition of organizations that form important power bases for women.

This book celebrates phenomenal African women who have made tremendous contributions in advancing African society.

Women Leaders of Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Pacific presents biographical sketches of hundreds of women leaders from earliest recorded history down to the present time. It is the first of two volumes giving data on women leaders from every continent and island in the world; the second volume deals with Europe and countries of the Western Hemisphere. Each book is divided into two sections. Part I of this volume deals with African women leaders; Part II with Asian, Middle East and Pacific women. Within each section, which is introduced by an essay overview, entries are arranged alphabetically. Suggestions for further reading on the subject appear at the end of each entry. Not all entries are merely recitations of facts. Some women's lives do not lend themselves to being reduced to statistics. Many were much too colorful, or lusty, or bloodthirsty to fit into a neat categorical description. How do you easily characterize the rule of the African queen who hacked her servant to death after she was through using him as a chair just to intimidate her new Portuguese overlord? Who kept as many as thirty slaves as sexual partners, supposedly killing them off when she had finished with them? How do you gloss over the actions of the newly enthroned Persian queen who ordered her stepbrother strangled, then had gold and silver coins struck bearing her new title: "Purity of the earthly world and of the faith"? How do you describe nicely the actions of the Chinese queen who chopped off her own hand to make a point to a man she had just condemned to death? How do you ascribe feminine traits to a grandmother who tried to kill her own grandson to keep him from succeeding her on the throne she herself had stolen? On the other hand, how do you do justice to the Queen of Tonga without mention of her commanding size six feet two inches or her forty-seven-year devotion to matters far beyond mere governance but of more importance to her subjects: like establishing handicraft outlets to market the wares of her people? Or to the Queen of Thailand who acted as Regent while the King, a devout Buddhist, performed his meditations and duties as a monk? She directed much more than affairs of state; her concern for the common people led her to promote the export of hand-woven Thai silk and to establish a chain of shops selling native crafts. She also organized the Thai Red Cross for aid to refugees, orphans, wounded soldiers, and flood victims. These and dozens of stories like them make African, Asian, Middle East, and Pacific Women Leaders a unique treasure that is hard to put down. Although most of the entries in this volume deal with women rulers, a portion of the book is devoted to women in leadership roles other than those of queen, empress, prime minister, or chieftainess. Of these additional entries, the majority deals with contemporary women judges, secretaries of state, cabinet members, or legislators of unusual influence and power.

How did African women negotiate the complex political, economic, and social forces of colonialism in their daily lives? How did they make meaningful lives for themselves in a world that challenged fundamental notions of work, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and family? By considering the lives of ordinary African women -- farmers, queen mothers, midwives, urban dwellers, migrants, and political leaders -- in the context of particular colonial conditions at specific places and times, Women in African Colonial Histories challenges the notion of a homogeneous "African women's experience." While recognizing the inherent violence and brutality of the colonial encounter, the essays in this lively volume show that African women were not simply the hapless victims of European political rule. Innovative use of primary sources, including life histories, oral narratives, court cases, newspapers, colonial archives, and physical evidence, attests that African women's experiences defy static representation. Readers at all levels will find this an important contribution to ongoing debates in African women's history and African colonial history.

An unapologetically African-centered monograph that reveals physical and spiritual forms and systems of female power and leadership in African cultures. Nwando Achebe’s unparalleled study documents elite females, female principles, and female spiritual entities across the African continent, from the ancient past to the present. Achebe breaks from Western perspectives, research methods, and their consequently incomplete, skewed accounts, to demonstrate the critical importance of distinctly African source materials and world views to any comprehensible African history. This means accounting for the two realities of African cosmology: the physical world of humans and the invisible realm of spiritual gods and forces. That interconnected universe allows biological men and women to become female-gendered males and male-gendered females. This phenomenon empowers the existence of particular African beings, such as female husbands, male priestesses, female kings, and female pharaohs. Achebe portrays their combined power, influence, and authority in a sweeping, African-centric narrative that leads to an analogous consideration of contemporary African women as heads of state, government officials, religious leaders, and prominent entrepreneurs.

Black Women in Leadership: Their Historical and Contemporary Contributions explores the leadership experiences of Black women within macro level (such as education, industry, and social services) and micro level (such as family and individual churches) contexts. The interdisciplinary work examines leadership practices, highlighting the historical and current triumphs and barriers of Black women in these roles. Black Women in Leadership further offers success strategies underlying Black women's leadership. With few exceptions (namely, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Height, Daisy Bates, and Angela Davis), the accomplishments of Black female leaders have historically been ignored, minimized, or primarily linked to those of prominent Black men. Black Women in Leadership centers upon elucidating factors motivating Black women to create their own identities and become leaders in their own right.

African women's history is a topic as vast as the continent itself, embracing an array of societies in over fifty countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. In African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, Kathleen Sheldon masterfully delivers a comprehensive study of this expansive story from before the time of records to the present day. She provides rich background on descent systems and the roles of women in matrilineal and patrilineal systems. Sheldon's work profiles elite women, as well as those in leadership roles, traders and market women, religious women, slave women, women in resistance movements, and women in politics and development. The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey establish a grand narrative about women's roles in the history of Africa.