Gender Inequality and the Colonial Economy: Evidence from Anglican Marriage Registers in Urban British Africa

We use Anglican marriage registers from six major cities in British Africa to examine how colonial educational and occupational opportunities affected gender inequality among the sampled couples in terms of access to schooling and the formal economy. The marriage registers concern more than 30,000 Anglican converts making up a comparatively advantaged group of urban Africans aspiring to advance their economic and social status during British colonial rule through conversion to Christianity. We use the couple’s signature literacy and occupational descriptors to argue that mission schools and the colonial economy opened up a gender gap in access to formal employment during the early colonial period that declined again after the 1940s through the Africanization and feminization of the civil service. We discern that the gender gap among the sampled couples closed earlier and faster in our West African cities where women’s tradition of financial independence contested Christian missionary ideals of female domesticity more prevalent in our East African locations. Comparison with census data indicates that our sampled couples were forerunners for the educational and occupational developments of the average African in the sampled cities.