Gendering Citizenship and Decolonizing Justice in 1960s Ghana
Revisiting the Struggle for Family Law Reform
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 8302936 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Kate Skinner (0000-0002-3559-4916, autor correspondente) |
| Ano | 2021 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Fascículo | 3 |
| Páginas | 357-387 |
| Data de publicação | 2021-02-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sim |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | American Journal of Legal History (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 0002-9319 • E-ISSN: 2161-797X |
| Editora | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ajlh/njaa015 |
| OpenAlex | W3129122110 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Citações recebidas | 4 |
| Referências citadas | 3 |
This article revisits the debates over family law reform in the years surrounding the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule. It builds upon social historical studies of marriage and child-rearing, and puts these into dialogue with the scholarship on legal pluralism, in order to examine the postcolonial implications of gendered legal struggles over social reproduction that arose during the colonial era. Drawing on key court cases, the report of a commission of inquiry, parliamentary debates, and the papers of a voluntary association, the article explores how different groups of women established their authority to speak on these issues, and why they were able to legitimate some reforms but not others. Whilst historians have pointed to the constraints that single-party socialism imposed on feminist mobilization in Ghana, this article explores further the ‘form, scale and scope’ of women’s agency. In the context of republican attempts to tackle colonial legacies of ‘deep legal pluralism’, and a programme of socialist development, women reformers framed their arguments in terms of a balance between the preservation of ‘custom’ and ‘advancement’ to modernity, and claimed their authority as mothers. By working creatively with the contradictions arising between legal, political, and sociological discourses, women parliamentarians secured a child maintenance law in 1965, even though earlier attempts to reform the marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws had ended in failure
Citizenship · Colonialism · Family law · Law reform · Legal pluralism · Legal profession · Legal realism · Modernity · Pluralism (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · African history and culture studies · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Land Rights and Reforms · Law
| Obras citantes distintas | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citações por ano | 0,8 |
| Intervalo de citações | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Velocidade de citação | current |
| Altamente citado | Não |
| Tipos de citação | Neutras: 4 |