Abosede A. George. Making Modern Girls

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of educated elite women in Lagos, colonial Nigeria’s capital, embarked on a project to modernize working-class girlhood by advocating for education as the best pathway for socialization and upward socioeconomic mobility. They also considered certain employment and work-place habits undesirable for girls in the city, where the contradictions of colonialism manifested in the co-habitation of “desirable” and “undesirable” activities and behaviors. In this new book, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos, Abosede A. George presents the history of girlhood within the context of a protracted struggle to “save” endangered girls from social problems that inhibited their transformation into “modern” and respectable girls. One of the main planks on which this elegantly written book stands is the ideology of salvation as a political discourse and its deployment in the contestation over the notions of modern girlhood. The significance of Making Modern Girls in African studies is incontestable—it is by all standards one of the most sophisticated studies of girlhood in colonial Africa. George presents her carefully mined primary data in an engaging manner, rendering a first-rate analysis of the struggle about the ideas of modern girlhood by a spectrum of people (Nigerians and British). Straddling the overlapping fields of development, gender and women, childhood, labor, and urban history, among other studies, Making Modern Girls gives readers a clear and unusual glimpse into what it takes to be a girl in colonial Lagos.

Colonialism · Ideology · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Social history (medicine) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies