Property and a piece of land give women peace of mind.

This is an exciting new collection from an impressive generation of young scholars. Their Eastern African focus makes geographical, historical and thematical sense, for the countries discussed in this volume have all undergone similar land reform and privatization processes in recent years.

It is a source of great personal pleasure that the book has drawn its inspiration from a 2003 workshop on women's land rights in Southern and Eastern Africa which I organized with the redoubtable Kaori Izumi of FAO. Participants there asserted that women's already fragile land rights were being further eroded in a global context of privatization, of World Bank-sponsored land reforms, of HIV/AIDS, and of changing global employment and trade patterns (Englert & Palmer 2003). This volume will help test that hypothesis further.

The struggle for women's land rights across the globe has both a long history and an extensive and distinguished literature. Both the history and the literature illustrate how difficult that struggle has been and, as yet, how few have been the concrete gains. This is nicely encapsulated in this recollection from Bina Agarwal: ‘In 1979 in West Bengal, India, a group of poor women told their elected village council: “Please go and ask the government why, when it distributes land, we don't get a title. Are we not peasants? If my husband throws me out, what is my security?”’ (Agarwal 2002, 2).

Everywhere women who have struggled for security have been confronted by resistance and by patriarchy in its many forms. This is because in many parts of the world land is so often regarded as a symbol of male dominance, and for women to challenge the status quo is to challenge patriarchal control – and thus other social and political inequalities. One of the complexities of gender and land issues, as has been frequently stressed, is that women's and men's interests within marriages and households are both joint and separate (UNRISD 2006, 3).

However, many land reform and administration programmes over more than 60 years have been premised on the notion of a unitary household in which resources (including title to land) were seen as benefiting the whole family in a fairly unproblematic way (UNRISD 2006, 1). Such programmes also regularly ignored the different meanings and values of land and how different rights to land are allocated, distributed, used and passed on.