This book is a massive undertaking and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of women, gender and colonialism, Kenyan history, East African history, and colonialism in Africa.

A most important and readable book, which is meticulously documented and explores the complexity of women's experiences in colonial Kenya. This book explores Maathai’s life within the historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts of her time. first two chapters set up the foundational argument of the book: that there is no monolithic portrayal of African women’s status and identity in colonial Kenya, but that individual strategies and engagements with figures of authority resulted in varied ideological and geographical migrations.This is a study of the genesis, evolution, adaptation and subordination of the Kikuyu squatter labourers, who comprised the majority of resident labourers on settler plantations and estates in the Rift Valley Province of the White Highlands.

As Kanogo demonstrates in discussing runaways and converts to Islam, women asserted agency in the space between customary and statutory law. But at the same time, she acquired global recognition and inspired millions to commit to protecting and rejuvenating the environment by planting trees. African Womanhood is deeply imbedded in Kenyan colonial archives, the historiography of Kenya, and combines and analyzes rich individual accounts of Kenyan women. Many viewed the reforestation, terracing, and other conservation measures as useless interventions that did not address the primary reason for the depletion of soil fertility and erosion. Kanogo’s African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya traces the history of womanhood in Kenya amidst social, cultural, and economic changes in the period of colonial rule from 1900 to 1950.Legislation tried to prevent child marriage, encourage demonstrations of women's consent, introduce formal registration and assign guardianship of children to widows in case of a husband's death. Initially, the latter developed into a viable but much resented sub-system which operated within and, to some extent, in competition with settler agriculture. Borrowing Cooper's terminology, Kanogo gives great attention to the conflict between colonialism and African subjects and between male elders and women, but rather less to the possibilities for accommodation between those actors. Chapter one on women’s legal and cultural status covers “the formative, deeply fractured and fluid” period of 1910 to 1930 in which the colonial administration attempted to codify women’s status under customary law.