Gender, Movement, and History: Social and Spatial Transformations in 20th Century Maradi, Niger

Abstract

Analyses of gender and space have been brought short by our awareness of the sterility of the familiar public-private binary, our difficulty gaining purchase upon local spatial practices through feminist abstractions insisting upon the importance of global ‘location’, and our growing realization that women are often implicated in the very gender ideologies that constrain them. In this paper, focusing upon historical changes in Muslim women's access to and occupation of different kinds of space in the Sahelian city of Maradi, Niger, the author shifts attention away from the spaces themselves and towards women's active movement through and transformation of the spaces of the body, the home, and the city. Women define themselves, their social status, and their economic possibilities by acquiring and transforming what the author calls ‘internal spaces’ and by entering into previously inaccessible ‘external spaces’. More concretely, they locate themselves socially and economically through the decoration of their rooms in their marital homes, through the acquisition of urban property, and through the adoption of veiling. By renegotiating their spatial position women reconfigure their economic and social options. In so doing they subtly and unconsciously alter the character of the urban terrain, the nature of local marriage, and the configuration of local gender relations. Women's attempts to reposition themselves have had complex and contradictory implications. They nevertheless make clear that gender analyses fixing upon reified spaces or scales are inadequate and that common Western assumptions about Muslim women's experience of internal spaces and veiling need to be rethought.