In Yoruba Women, Work and Social Change, Majorie McIntosh renders an encyclopedic narration of Yoruba women from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. What should otherwise be a daunting task, considering the vast variety and diversity of Yoruba identity and culture, is masterfully and coherently presented. The author accomplishes this by synthesizing the vast literature on Yoruba history and by reading more recent innovative studies in the light of and against the established literature. She complements these with archival (mostly local court) records. As a historical overview, it synthesizes more thematic and more spatially restricted accounts of Yoruba women. In short, this deservingly earns the credit of being the first comprehensive history of Yoruba women.

The study sets neatly in Yoruba historiography, and it engages the wider debates on gender in Africa. It reconciles the poles set by Oyeronke Oyewumi's thesis that the Yoruba did not conceive of gender in the form of fixed sexual categories that European patriarchy later imposed on them. This thesis runs contrary to J. D. Y. Peel's use of the CMS records to affirm that gender roles and differentiations were real as were the gendered attractions to mission Christianity. McIntosh shows that these positions are not mutually exclusive: (for) while the Yoruba did not conceive of gender in sharp boundaries, certain qualities, behaviors, and responsibilities were gendered (p. 19). Such blurred boundaries enabled women to craft spaces of expression, influence, and power in precolonial society and to contend with and navigate the constraints and opportunities of nineteenth-century Christian missions, colonial power, and the Atlantic economy; and to mitigate traditional and colonial patriarchy. McIntosh's account of Yoruba women highlights their vibrancy and historical agency, their cooperation among themselves and the ways they checked (and often outsmarted) patriarchy.

The rest of the book provides interesting accounts of women's agency. Chapter five on family and marriage is particularly refreshing because it captures the dynamic processes in which women (and men) interpreted and used social resources to push claims for independence and control. Thus in the colonial era women sued their husbands for divorce, maintenance, and child custody while men tried to use the courts to secure the return of dowry and for child custody. These engagements are clearly shown to be a part of an ongoing social dynamic in which women navigated constraining patriarchal structures like as the city layout, compound setting, and the lineage system, and traditions like widow-inheritances. Other chapters explore women's engagement with property laws and customs, their struggles for economic independence and their rather forceful penetration of gendered professions and colonial service careers, while limiting and regulating entry to terrains defined as feminine. Other women strategies included the forming of Egbe associations and guilds, and their religious and supernatural powers as aje (witches).

The strength of Yoruba Women surpasses the accomplished ambition of the book, the readability of its prose and the organization of its structure for which it has drawn appropriate reviews and commendations. It reads well as an introductory text for courses in African women's history and for readers new to African history, because it adequately represents the cumulative scholarly knowledge on Yoruba women. Yet there is much more to this book than what it directly offers. It appears to be the long-awaited launch-pad upon which a more critical historiography of the Yoruba can proceed. Calls for a review of the underpinnings of Yoruba history and culture has always been expressed (if mutedly); they have gathered much steam since Peel's Ethnogenesis (1989). An increasing number of scholars like Karin Barber (1991), Andrew Apter (1992), Olufemi Vaughan (2002), Koya Ogen (2008), Olatunji Ojo (2008), and others are challenging the assumptions of homogeneity in Yoruba identity and culture. As the first summation of Yoruba women's history and as one of the most recent pan-Yoruba histories, the book makes it possible to examine these assumptions of Yoruba cultural homogeneity. A more critical perspective on Yoruba history has to begin with a determination of whether Yoruba identity is and has always been unambiguous; following which the values and characters ascribed to this identity can be reconfirmed. Underlying many accounts of ‘Yoruba women’ is the assumption that there were such women during the nineteenth century and that these women held this identity to be meaningful. McIntosh navigates this problematic of incoherence by defining her subjects as those ‘who spoke any language or dialect within the Yoruba linguistic family’ (p. 7). The ambiguities of Yoruba characters may well be the outcome of the ethnic and political mapping of their history (which excluded some and imposed Yoruba identity on some) against the realities of widespread movement of peoples and ideas during the nineteenth century. For a discipline that appears to be locked in the celebratory modes and descriptive forms of the nationalist paradigm, Yoruba Women invites more critical explorations.

Furthermore, the book invites us to conceive of the precolonial African society as a dynamic one. In contradistinction to common views of traditional societies, Yoruba Women locates the behavior of women in an ongoing discourse that has spanned precolonial society to the postcolonial state. Women always contested social values, traditions, and laws, and they always struggled to create spaces of expression, independence, and control. As such, McIntosh contributes to the age-long debate on whether the nineteenth century was a period of transformative change or the continuity of change. This work thus unleashes a capacity to envision the precolonial as the dynamic rather than static platform upon which subsequent change took place. Yoruba Women is valuable as a reflection of the state of knowledge on the Yoruba and as the benchmark from which the future of Yoruba studies can proceed. It will be well referred to for a long time.