Based on a study of women in one Nigerian city, it is the contention of this article that female migration cannot properly be understood or analyzed without reference to a variety of gender-specific factors. This article concentrates on one category of women, the autonomous migrants, and examines the patterns and the precipitating and contributory causes of their migration, and its effects.

A series of policy initiatives have been put forward in Nigeria over the last two decades aimed at expanding its educational system. But while numbers enroled have increased, gender and class differentials persist. Females have always been represented in smaller numbers than have males and have tended to be disproportionately drawn from the more privileged elements of society. This has broadly accorded with ideologies justifying a primarily domestic role for women which, in the case of Katsina in northern Nigeria, have emanated both from the secular state and the religious authorities. Pittin examines the latest policy initiative, a directive that females at secondary level would be educated only in boarding schools. While suggesting that it is likely to perpetuate and even exacerbate the women's relatively disadvantaged position as regards education, she also argues that it offers certain benefits. Moreover, because promulgated as consistent with Islamic morality, precisely at a time when greater legitimacy is being accorded to women's education by elements of the Muslim community, and Islamic schools are themselves permitting some questioning of previously accepted notions of women's role, it may offer space for some improvement of women's situation.

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Struggles to control Nigeria's dwindling resources, and to gain or maintain power within the context of economic crisis, are taking place at local, state, regional and federal levels, within and outside formal political structures. The ideologies with which these struggles have been associated, and the struggles themselves, have particular implications for the effects upon women, mediated and mitigated, however, by class differences. This article describes the significance of women's economic activities in Katsina and, taking the example of the persecution of ‘independent women’, explores the conflicting ideologies which circumscribe women.

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