Ann Mungai – författare

Growing Up in Kenya: Rural Schooling and Girls reveals the clash between the traditional values and roles of women and the school culture and expectations. Traditionally, women were brought up to value the roles of wife, mother, and cultivator. This book shows the struggle rural girls experience as they try to fit into these traditional roles while meeting the expectations of the school curriculum. Although education is central to a woman’s status, because it affects every other aspect of her life, studies indicate that parents have lower occupational aspirations for their daughters than for their sons. This is true for higher socio-economic groups as well as when the daughters’ academic performance is superior to that of the sons’.

The contributors to Written in Her Own Voice illuminate how gender and gender roles affect women’s advancement, educational success, and life aspirations. Chapters provide thick, rich descriptions of the authors’ lives, using heuristic and phenomenological inquiry as guiding theoretical frameworks. These women write about how power relations within society continue to promote exclusion and marginalization along race, gender, class, and religious lines around the globe. They examine the influences of families, communities, and societies in their educational and professional lives. This unique project has produced fascinating stories from real-life anecdotes, examining the role of families in developing one’s sense of self vis-à-vis others and the role of culture and community in the development of personhood. Diasporic experiences give voice to adaptations and changes that occur when two cultures (i.e., Western and native cultures) collide. The authors courageously narrate how they find their voices amidst the noises that threaten to drown them out.