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Kathleen Sheldon

ASA News, Apr 2004 by Sheldon, Kathleen

(Independent historian, Research scholar at University of California, Los Angeles): Biographical Statement

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When I was a senior in high school I wrote a paper on the development of apartheid in South Africa. I was drawn to that topic by a concern with racial politics in the U.S., and I thought if I could understand the extreme racism present in South Africa I might better comprehend my own country. My commitment to understanding the world in order to try to improve the situation has continued as a focus of all of my work. I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University where I majored in History and earned credits equivalent to a major in Political Science, as well as a Certificate in African Studies. During those years in the early 1970s I also became aware of political developments in Mozambique, and I was particularly interested in new policies designed to emancipate women. I began to study Portuguese and wrote research papers on Mozambique. I continued my education at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), first earning a Masters in African Area Studies in 1977, and completing my Ph.D. in History in 1988. In addition to continuing my study of Portuguese, I studied Swahili for three years, initially hoping to do research in northern Mozambique among coastal communities. While still a graduate student I co-compiled A Guide to Social Science Resources in Women's Studies (ABCClio, 1977), which was deliberately global in its listings and was one of the first annotated bibliographies in the thennew field of women's studies. In the early 1980s I lived for two years in Beira, Mozambique, with my husband and toddler daughter while I completed my dissertation research on working women in the city. The conflict with Renamo was escalating, and our experience of wartime conditions motivated me to join with other concerned colleagues in founding the Los Angeles chapter of the Mozambique Support Network when I returned. I returned to Mozambique for extended visits in 1989, 1994, and 1998. The Mozambicans I met on those trips, especially the many impressive women who collaborated in my research, set a standard of commitment through their resourcefulness in the face of terrible difficulties.

My research sparked my curiosity about urban African women, resulting in the collection I edited, Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa (Westview, 1996), and articles in Lusotopie and the Canadian Journal of African Studies. I published articles about Mozambican women in Arquivo: Boletim do Arquivo Historico de Mocambique, Women's Studies International Forum, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and in the edited collections African Encounters with Domesticity, Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World, and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women's Issues Worldwide: Sub-Saharan Africa. I also published in History in Africa and contributed to the collection African Novels in the Classroom. My most recent book brings much of that material together in Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (Heinemann, 2002). I am completing a new reference publication, A Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa which will be published by Scarecrow Press in 2004 or 2005. That project indicates my continuing interest in making the history of African women more widely known and understood.

Because of family commitments I have remained in Los Angeles, where I taught African history and women's studies in part-time positions from 1986 to 1998 at UCLA, California State University at Long Beach, and Occidental College. I am an independent historian, with an academic affiliation with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, where I have been a Research Scholar since completing my dissertation. As a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars I am committed to improving conditions for scholars who are not formally employed in academia and therefore lack reliable access to libraries and funding, though many are camouflaged by part-time and temporary university affiliations. In 1999 I was honored with the Catherine Prelinger Scholarship Award from the Coordinating Council for Women in History, a prize specifically designated for independent scholars pursuing women's history.

I have actively worked to integrate African issues into women's history. For the 1992 American Historical Association annual meeting I organized a panel on "Gender and Ideology in Southern African History," which I believe is still the only complete panel on African women ever included as part of the program of the AHA annual meeting. I also have been active in the Western Association of Women Historians, the Huntington Library Women's Studies Seminars, and in my community as a ten-year member of the Santa Monica Commission on the Status of Women.

In ASA I have worked to develop incorporate women's history into African studies. I have been a committed member of the ASA Women's Caucus for over fifteen years, serving as treasurer and membership coordinator from 1997-2003. During the 1980s I helped coordinate Caucussponsored panels on women and gender, contributing the much stronger position of women's studies today.

Kathleen Sheldon

ASA News, Apr 2004 by Sheldon, Kathleen

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