Gender, Identity, and Anti-Colonial Resistance: A Comparative Study of Women’s Movements in Southeastern and South-South Nigeria, 1929 to 1958

This study provides a comparative empirical analysis of women's anti-colonial resistance movements in Southeastern and South-South Nigeria from the Aba Women's Riot of 1929 to the Market Women's Associations' anti-tax protests of the 1950s, examining how gender identity, economic grievances, and colonial administrative structures jointly shaped women's political mobilisation across these regions. The study addresses a significant historiographical gap: the majority of Nigerian nationalist historiography focuses on male elite political actors, while the distinctive forms of female collective action that characterised South East and South South resistance have received inadequate systematic comparative attention. A comparative historical design is employed, drawing on colonial inquiry commission records, district officer intelligence reports, missionary society archives, and oral history interviews with 20 elderly women community leaders in Aba and Warri, supplemented by secondary feminist historiography published between 2020 and 2024. The Feminist Theory of History and the Social Movement Theory provide the analytical lenses. Findings reveal that women's movements in both zones employed traditional collective sanction mechanisms including market boycotts, communal singing of protest, and occupation of administrative spaces as forms of political action that exploited gaps in the colonial security apparatus. The study contributes an original comparative framework for analysing gendered anti-colonial politics in Nigeria. Keywords: women's resistance, anti-colonial movements, gender, Southeastern Nigeria, feminist historiography.