• Empowerment

Empowerment

Western discourse on the status of women and their positions in society, the inequity in their employment experiences, and their limited participation in leadership dominates intellectual theorizing on African women. This article employs African data to de-marginalize African women by explicating how women from Kenya articulate servant-leadership as motherhood in the public domain.

Motherhood in Africa is a site of contestation, as it is both a highly regarded status to which women aspire and a site for the marginalization of those women who, either through infertility or otherwise, find themselves unable to be biological parents. In this article, the author looks at motherhood specifically as it relates to women’s leadership in grassroots, national, Pan- African, and global settings, based on qualitative research with sixteen leaders. This article illustrates how these women articulate motherhood in the public domain, making use of the positive regard that motherhood bestows upon them socially to gain credibility with their constituents. Those who were not biological mothers illustrate the social stigma associated with childlessness and their struggles to gain credibility as leaders. The article illustrates three ways that motherhood and leadership are connected:

• motherhood gives the women social status and credibility for leadership in their communities
• the responsibility inherent in motherhood generates leadership
• through their own mothers and grandmothers, the women leaders learn a brand of leadership that is based on service.
  

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