Militant Mothers: Gender and the Politics of Anticolonial Action in Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

On 24 December 1949, two thousand women marched on the prison at Grand Bassam in protest of the detention of militants of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). Considered the first mass demonstration by West African women against French colonial rule, the march on Grand Bassam was a watershed moment in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement. Though party officials have framed women's activism as a political 'awakening', women's militancy was in keeping with longstanding practices of public motherhood, whereby women's status as caregivers - both biological and symbolic - authorized their moral interventions in community life. Maternal authority enabled a variety of powerful political tactics, yet in an Ivoirian anticolonial context dominated by elite negotiations, it also circumscribed women's activism. This article examines the women's march on Grand Bassam as a case study for understanding the possibilities and limits of women's participation in the Ivoirian anticolonial movement.