As she explains in an honest and informative introduction, Penvenne wrote her most recent book to critique earlier labor histories of Mozambique, including her own. Drawing on archival sources and concentrating on leading industries, these prior works were histories of men. Reflecting on her writings and on her experiences in Mozambique, Penvenne decided to remedy the gender imbalance. The challenges of defining the topic and refining a methodology to unearth it remained. In this book, Penvenne met those challenges by taking women’s stories seriously. As a result, she has delivered a warm and generous narrative.
Penvenne is convincingly critical about the blind spots and inaccuracies in state-produced archival sources. Oral testimonies are more difficult to analyze than archival or documentary sources and more difficult to understand, but the lessons are more valuable. Her methodology to uncover the details about female workers was to listen to them as “narrators,” not merely...