In the 1970s among peoples of the third world migration, paid employment, and urban living had caused changes in domestic economies, in decision making in households, and in the sexual division of labour and power. This was particularly so in areas formerly subjected to colonial domination and therefore the influence of European mores and institutions.

This book, previously published in 1974 as Marriage Among a Matrilineal Elite, this edition in 1981, provides one of the few detailed accounts of such changes, by a writer who has lived the kind of life she describes, that of the urban educated Akan of Southern Ghana - people who have migrated from farming and fishing villages to Accra the capital to find employment in government institutions after protracted higher education, often overseas.

The study is particularly interesting because it focuses upon people from an ethnic area practicing matrilineal descent and inheritance, in which women and men have traditionally both worked in agriculture: in which husbands and wives have customarily resided in separate houses, affording both sexes considerable autonomy as spouses and in which women have held important political offices, as well as sharing responsibilities for maintenance of dependent children. Akan women provide an important model of responsible energetic females, who have in the past and to some extent in the present, avoided the domestic trap of wifely dependence. But, as we read, the trap is open to those who forsake traditional patterns of economic endeavour or whose resources vis