Book Review

Abstract

Women and Credit: Researching the Past, Refiguring the Future Beverley Lemire, Ruth Pearson &Gail Campbell (Eds) Berg Publishers, Oxford, 2002, 352 pp., cloth, ISBN 1 85973 471 0 £42,99; paperback, ISBN 1 85973 484 7, £15,99. Women and Credit is a substantial addition to our knowledge of the role of women in exploiting economic opportunities and niches through the use of credit agencies and other initiatives. This volume forms part of the series ‘Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women’ from the International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford (formerly the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women). It takes the 1995 volume Money-go-rounds: the importance of savings and credit associations for women (Oxford: Berg Publishers) further. While Money-go-rounds focused on present-day rotating savings and credit associations in Africa, Asia and a number of diaspora communities, Women and Credit takes a global and historical view of the subject, as well as suggesting policy directions for microfinance programmes involving women. The book is divided into five parts, with between two and four chapters in each section. This arrangement demarcates neatly the difference between a historical overview of women and credit (Parts I, II and III), impacts and issues (Part IV) and policy perspectives (Part V). The early chapters use historical material from Western Europe to demonstrate the importance of credit markets and access to credit for the poor. Laurence Fontaine notes that in England between 1660 and 1779 credit represented 64 per cent of the wealth of unemployed widows and single people. The 19th century saw the introduction of the Loan Fund scheme in Ireland and the beginnings of stokvels in South Africa. The Irish Loan Fund functioned in many ways like a stokvel, being set up to make small loans to poor individuals to finance an asset that would generate sufficient cash to enable the loan to be repaid. For instance, such a loan might be to purchase livestock for a farm that would be idle without it. In South Africa four categories of stokvel emerged, ranging from simple savings clubs to investment clubs or syndicates, often dealing in property, high-budget stokvels and, most importantly, burial societies. Grietje Verhoef notes that stokvels are the biggest industry in the informal sector in South Africa and important in the survival strategies of black women in urban and rural areas.