In Uncertain Honor: Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks examines a fundamental tenet of development policy: that formal schooling for girls and national fertility rates are inversely related. This premise has guided hundreds of development programs and millions of dollars in international aid toward the combined purposes of keeping girls in school and reducing population growth. A large body of research has explored the schooling–fertility relationship; however, few scholars, until Johnson-Hanks, have considered how, and to what effect, it emerges in localized contexts.

In examining contemporary womanhood and schooling in West Africa, Johnson-Hanks examines two questions: (1) how and why do educated Beti women in southern Cameroon delay childbearing for so long? and (2) what does it mean to become an educated Beti woman? Combining anthropological and demographic approaches, Johnson-Hanks shows that people, not schools, are at the root of biological reproduction and social change. Whereas policy makers have contributed to the “enchantment” of education by attributing agency to schools for decreasing fertility, Johnson-Hanks starts from the anthropological premise that people make schools and that what goes on in and with respect to schools is the product of collective belief and social action. She strives and succeeds in showing how Beti women judge education to be meaningful—and meaningless.

First, Johnson-Hanks investigates how schooling and sex both reference a system of honor among the Beti to shape childbearing practices among educated women. She details classroom relationships and selectivity into and out of schooling to understand how “honorable self-dominion” emerges as a key aspect of educated Beti womanhood. She then describes the sexual and reproductive lives of women and analyzes the complex strategies they use to achieve a contradictory set of objectives regarding educational attainment, the timing of motherhood, and pursuit of honor. In the final chapters of the book, Johnson-Hanks develops a theoretical approach, the “vital conjuncture,” to understand the social processes behind the schooling–fertility relationship.

Two concepts are key to Johnson-Hanks’s analysis: “honor” and “timing.” Although schooling is seen to produce honor, Johnson-Hanks shows how women themselves orient their actions toward the system of honor, in part, to achieve the status of “educated Beti woman.” Honor for these young women is uncertain not because the standard is too demanding, “but because the category itself—still in flux—is internally contradictory” (p. 159) with respect to time. Johnson-Hanks identifies a normative order of life events that defines three notable characteristics of honorable Beti women: bearing children while still young, staying in school, and marrying before having children. Yet these characteristics are so “fundamentally incompatible” that “every educated woman will necessarily have strayed in some way” (p. 159). It is up to women themselves to resolve these temporal contradictions with the strategies at their disposal—birth control, abortion, child fosterage by family members, or early marriage. What Johnson-Hanks demonstrates so very well is that fertility rates come about through finding “new ways of being and bringing together partially incompatible identities” (p. 159). And it is through reconceptualizing time in the study of life histories that she achieves this.
Johnson-Hanks uses the theoretical tool she calls the “vital conjuncture” to understand the reproductive histories of three Beti women as fundamentally social—instead of as events happening to individuals—and to challenge the linearity of time assumed in most analyses of the life course. Through looking at the shared circumstance of unforeseen pregnancy and a shared set of alternatives, Johnson-Hanks examines the “horizons of the conjuncture”—the way each woman makes meaning of her options through futures imagined and constructed according to local narratives. These horizons “orient action …, translating local values into population facts … [providing] people facing vital conjunctures with common ways of reasoning and reacting” (p. 234). The “vital conjuncture” is a potentially useful theoretical tool for understanding life-historical moments, individualized in demographic data, as social phenomena. The significance of socially constructed histories (how groups of people understand who they are, where they came from, and what is important)—as well as socially imagined futures—for the navigation of transformative life moments, however, should also be considered.

With Uncertain Honor, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks taps the strengths of educational and demographic anthropology to demystify the near-magical power of “modernity,” its institutions, and the scientific discourse used to describe and legitimate them. Through her astute ethnography, adept handling of demographic data, and vivid portraits of young Beti women, the intricate local social processes behind the schooling–fertility relationship in Cameroon come to life. Although the study might have benefited from looking beyond schoolgirls—to their partners, parents, and peers not in school—to understand the significance of education to childbearing and womanhood, it is well-researched, its stories richly woven, and its conclusions tightly bound. The book will be appreciated by scholars and students alike in anthropology, demography, African studies, gender studies, development studies, and education.

[tables, figures, notes, references, index.]