In Telling Stories, Making Histories, Mary Wren Bivins aims to broaden our understanding of women's daily lives and experiences in nineteenth-century Hausaland. The nineteenth century was both a critical and transformative period in Hausaland. Usman dan Fodio and the jihād he initiated helped to remake the political, economic and religious map of the region. But Bivins argues that male voices and experiences in that process have been privileged by scholars. She wants instead to understand how nineteenth-century Hausa women responded to and participated in the changes ushered in by both the jihād and the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate. This is a vitally important task. Moreover, Bivins was faced with difficulty in generating oral data from the period she hoped to study, so she turned to traveler's accounts, folktales and elite literary sources to uncover the nuances and textures of women's lives.

The book is organized in seven loosely related chapters, which each explore a facet of the social history of Hausa women, as Bivins states: ‘each chapter in this book revisits one of the intellectual sites that I examined in order to advance my understanding of nineteenth century Hausa women’ (p. 7). Bivins begins by attempting to uncover the voices of Hausa women in the accounts of European travelers to Hausaland. She argues that because those travelers relied on Hausa women for language skills, food and information, evidence of these women's experiences and voices is embedded in those texts. Chapter 3 continues to use travelers' accounts but also adds Hausa folktales into the mix in order to examine Hausa agrarian life and food production. She notes that women had a central role in provisioning caravans and that some women had extensive opportunities to meet and engage with various European travelers and their retinues. In Chapter 4, Bivins considers the social spaces of story telling in order to sort through the gendered nature of ‘work and play, family and society’ (p. 76) in Hausaland. Marriage, farming, sexuality and folk-culture are all examined in some very interesting ways. Chapters 5 and 6 focus broadly on marriage and Islam. In Chapter 5, Bivins's aim is to sort through the ‘lived experience of Hausa women and in Islamic reform’ (p. 97) by focusing in part on the tensions in marriages and courtship. In Chapter 6, the author continues to focus on Islam but does so from an elite perspective. She examines the poems and work of Nana Asma'u in order to understand the image of the ideal Muslim Hausa woman and the place of women within reformist Islam in Hausaland.

While Telling Stories, Making Histories certainly has tremendous potential, it is only partially realized as a monograph. First and foremost, the author does not fully develop an argument; the chapters are largely unanchored to a central historical narrative and lack analytical focus. Often the reader is left to guess at how all the information presented by Bivins fits together. The chapters also lack focus as stand-alone pieces. This makes for what is at times a frustrating, rather than an enlightening, read. Second, nowhere are the broader patterns of women's lives examined in the context of change over time. What changed in Hausaland between – for example – 1810 and 1893? How were women's lives different? It would also have been useful to consider more carefully social class and generational differences between women and the impact those differences had on female lived experience. I also wondered how women's experience might have differed across the vast geography of Hausaland. Did their experiences vary between the regions in and around Kano, and Zazzau, and Kastina? If so, how? Third, while the material that uses Edgar's collection of Hausa folktales is stimulating, the reader is still left with the central question: what actually went on in the nineteenth century in the lives of real women and men? Although Bivins demonstrates numerous ways to tease social history out of her sources, she is perhaps too free in reading her own experiences back into the past. Finally, the monograph is in rather desperate need of a stronger editorial hand. It is repetitive and contains numerous typos that detract from the monograph's content, although this no doubt says more about Greenwood/Heinemann than about the author. Overall, while it is full of rich detail and some thoughtful discussions, Telling Stories, Making Histories does not hold together well as a monograph. It is nonetheless still a useful addition to the scholarship on nineteenth-century Hausaland.