Women, Land Rights and Rural Development

This book presents a comparative history of how rural women claimed-or were prevented from claiming-land in the course of private and collectivist property rights revolutions in very different times and places. Using seventeenth-century England, twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century colonial Kenya as historical case studies-despite their obvious and striking differences-the book introduces women, and evidence of female agency, into the predominantly male-centered narratives of rural economic history.

Esther Kingston-Mann is Ford Service Professor Emerita in the Department of History at University of Massachusetts Boston.

Introduction 1. How the Other Half Lives: Rural Women Encounter England's Land Rights Revolution 2. Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Republic: The Majority as an Obstacle to Progress? 3. "Without Land I Am Nothing!": Kikuyu Women and Land Rights. Conclusion