Marjorie Keniston McIntosh's book on Yoruba Women, Work and Social Change explores the role of Yoruba women in south-west Nigeria from the 1820s to the 1960s. The book emphasizes the many ways in which women had economic, political and ritual agency in areas ranging from trade, agriculture and politics to religion and education. In the nineteenth century, women held greater domestic responsibilities than men, but they also expected to work, to earn money and to be responsible for their own finances irrespective of their marital status. While the gendered expectations embedded in the colonial and Christian (and Islamic) institutions that took hold during the twentieth century often disadvantaged them, many women maintained a high degree of personal agency throughout the colonial period. Women's agency reflected their continued economic participation in agricultural production and trade, but also on their appropriation of “modern” professions such as teaching and nursing. However, while their relative independence enabled women to support a wide range of organizations from churches to the independence movement, their relative disadvantage vis-à-vis men especially in the modern political realm is illustrated by their low numbers in elected office during the 1950s.

There is likely to be much interest in the book's suitability for teaching because, despite a long history of scholarly attention to the Yoruba of south-west Nigeria, and regardless of the significant academic interest in women and gender relations since the 1970s, it is the first book-length general history of Yoruba women. The main reason for this is that the central categories of inquiry – the Yoruba and Yoruba women – are at the heart of lively and ongoing academic debates. Historically, the ascription of gender in most Yoruba polities was creative and subject to contextual multiplicity. As a result, some women were able to attain positions generally associated with male agency, even though women as a group were rarely able to attain the same kinds of power as men. Any attempt to examine historical gender roles is further complicated by the fact that the Yoruba were not part of a common centralized polity in documented history, and that contemporary Yoruba identity is the result of an ongoing process of cultural consolidation which can be traced to the nineteenth century. While the many existing Yoruba communities share important features, the possibilities of gendered ascription continue to differ widely. Therefore, any history of Yoruba women must take into account the exact form and reach of pre-colonial ideologies and practices, the differential impact of British gender expectations, and the ways in which nationalist and colonial attempts to create a generalized Yoruba practice were grounded in specific localities.

Considering the complexity of the debate on gender – and, implicitly, the ethnic nation – among the Yoruba, perhaps it needed an outsider to pluck up the courage to produce a general book on Yoruba women. McIntosh is well qualified for this position: as an internationally renowned historian of women, she originally worked on the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period in England before focusing on Africa, where she explored the history of Baganda women before turning her attention to south-west Nigeria. But while her position as an outsider has undoubtedly enabled McIntosh to embark on this book, her attempt to cut through the existing debates on gender and Yoruba-ness reduces its appeal to scholars who have participated and invested in these debates. At the same time, McIntosh's approach makes her book a valuable addition to introductory and survey courses of Africa.

The book is arranged in four parts, starting with an introduction which provides an overview of Yoruba historical gender relations as well as a discussion of methods and sources employed. The second part is based almost exclusively on secondary sources and provides what McIntosh considers the context of women's lives. Two chapters focus on the main historical events of the period under consideration, and a third provides an exploration of the social structures in which women's personal lives were lived. This self-imposed disciplinary division is perhaps the least satisfying aspect of the book, because it creates the impression that history and culture affected women's lives separately and in different ways. While McIntosh attempts to link these sections, her approach means that some areas receive less attention than they deserve. For example, her reliance on general histories of the region means that she privileges the long-distance trade, which tended to be dominated by men, over local trade, which constituted an economic niche largely dominated by women. As a result, the author pays insufficient attention to the gendered nature of change in agriculture and local trade and overlooks, for example, the introduction and increased consumption of the now ubiquitous, and historically almost exclusively female-controlled cassava products from the late nineteenth century onwards.

In the third part McIntosh explores women's engagement in specific economic activities in greater detail. She emphasizes the independent roles played by women in agriculture and trade in the nineteenth century, and explores the way in which the introduction of colonial ideas about “female professions” affected women's professional choices in the twentieth century. In all walks of life, Yoruba women adapted their skills to suit more widespread cultural notions as well as their continued domestic roles, and many women, even in the modern sector, preferred the setting up of independent businesses to being employed. The final part of the book focuses on other public roles performed by women, with chapters on religious and political authority, and a conclusion. Most of these chapters are detailed without being overloaded, and McIntosh's use of primary material – mostly drawn from Native Court Records – illustrates the ambitions and strategies of women at times of personal and societal transition. Rather unexpectedly but very interestingly, the book also provides examples from the Ikale, a much-neglected Yoruba-speaking group in the very south-eastern corner of Yorubaland. These case studies and examples constitute the strong point of the book because they illuminate the contextuality of women's life chances. The details of the female lives explored through personal and public disputes show the multiplicity of Yoruba women's forms of agency, and it can only be hoped that they will reach a wide and general audience.