This volume engages the issue of women’s ethnicity and makes contributions to debates about how and why women’s movements have a unifying role in African political organization and peace movements. Drawing on field research in different regions of Africa, the contributors demonstrate in their essays that women do make choices about the forms of ethnicity they embrace, creating alternatives to male-centered definitions - in some cases rejecting a specific ethnic identity in favor of an interethnic alliance, in others reinterpreting the meaning of ethnicity within gendered domains, and in others performing ethnic power in gendered ways.