Kyomuhendo and McIntosh have undertaken a study of women and (income-generating) work in Uganda from the early colonial years to the early twenty-first century. They argue that eight factors combined in different ways over the years to shape the lives of working women: economic factors (existence of markets, women's need and/or desire to gain access to cash); political factors (state policies, warfare and physical danger); education; religion; women's organizations; legal protection of women; demography and health; and ideology. Of particular importance is what they term the ‘Domestic Virtue Model’, or DVM. Beginning in the early colonial period, they argue, a new ideology emerged that set very definite gender roles and divisions of labor. Women were to concentrate on being good wives and mothers, to care for their households, to be submissive to their male guardians (and indeed all men), to not work outside the home, and to not take part in the public arena. Once established, Kyomuhendo and McIntosh argue, the DVM remained ‘remarkably persistent’ (p. 2), shaping the lives of many Ugandan women even in 2003. The DVM has not remained unchanged, however, but has evolved – it twice ‘generated variant forms’, one of which accepted that women might work out of the home if economic necessity required it for the survival of the household (p. 2).

While intriguing, the authors' DVM is insufficiently historicized (perhaps because neither are historians of Africa?). I wonder how confident we can be in their assertion that the DVM was essentially a product of the early to mid colonial era (roughly 1900 to 1939). They argue that the changes of these years ‘dislocated accepted patterns of life and thought concerning women’ (p. 65). First, of course, we must wonder just how ‘accepted’ these patterns were: how settled were notions of gender and sexuality in 1900? Second – a point that Kyomuhendo and McIntosh acknowledge – much of their evidence comes from Buganda. This was necessary, the authors explain, because the sources for the early twentieth century are richer for Buganda than elsewhere. They also argue that missionary and administrative activities, often centered in the kingdom, meant that the DVM ‘was heavily influenced by Baganda patterns’ (p. 66). Yet one wonders if there were not regional differences in the DVM, if Acholi or Soga or Gisu ideas about gender meant that the DVM played out very differently there. Third, while acknowledging that the DVM had its origins in precolonial Uganda, they have very little to say about the years before 1900 (pp. 67–8). Without some kind of baseline, it is difficult to assess the impact of colonialism and Christianity, whether they ushered in a deep break with the precolonial era or simply introduced new wrinkles into much older debates. Nonetheless, the idea that a (partially?) new gender discourse was emerging in these decades fits well with recent research that points to the inter-war years as ones in which gender and sexuality, and the control of African women, took on increasing importance among African and European men.

Kyomuhendo and McIntosh's sources pose another set of questions. A total of 113 women were interviewed, sampled from various parts of the country, all of whom ‘were active participants in the market economy or had retired from it’ (p. 28). Kyomuhendo and McIntosh intentionally restricted themselves to such women in order to ‘set manageable boundaries around [their] project’, without intending to downgrade the importance of work in subsistence agriculture and within the home. As a result, the interviewees were far from typical: roughly 40 per cent were divorced, separated or had never married. That is, these were women who very publicly did not conform to the Domestic Virtue Model. Their stories are fascinating (ten are profiled in detail), but one wonders if more ‘traditional’ women would not have had a different story to tell. Kyomuhendo and McIntosh also consulted local newspapers, although not full runs. For example, they examined the Uganda Herald for 1915 and every tenth year thereafter, and Munno for 1920, 1930, 1941, 1950, and 1960. Admittedly, flipping each page of a year's worth of even one paper is time-consuming business; to do so for multiple papers over many years is a daunting task. Yet one imagines that much was missed in selecting only certain years to look at. In Kenya, for example, Muiguithania was a prime site for literate Gikuyu to debate gender in the 1920s and 1930s; one wonders what Baganda were writing in Munno in these years.