Gendering Citizenship and Decolonizing Justice in 1960s Ghana: Revisiting the Struggle for Family Law Reform

Abstract

This article revisits the debates over family law reform in the years surrounding the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule. It builds upon social historical studies of marriage and child-rearing, and puts these into dialogue with the scholarship on legal pluralism, in order to examine the postcolonial implications of gendered legal struggles over social reproduction that arose during the colonial era. Drawing on key court cases, the report of a commission of inquiry, parliamentary debates, and the papers of a voluntary association, the article explores how different groups of women established their authority to speak on these issues, and why they were able to legitimate some reforms but not others. Whilst historians have pointed to the constraints that single-party socialism imposed on feminist mobilization in Ghana, this article explores further the ‘form, scale and scope’ of women’s agency. In the context of republican attempts to tackle colonial legacies of ‘deep legal pluralism’, and a programme of socialist development, women reformers framed their arguments in terms of a balance between the preservation of ‘custom’ and ‘advancement’ to modernity, and claimed their authority as mothers. By working creatively with the contradictions arising between legal, political, and sociological discourses, women parliamentarians secured a child maintenance law in 1965, even though earlier attempts to reform the marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws had ended in failure.