In the House: Managing Double Lives

Chapter 1 explores young women’s experiences growing up in their fathers’ households to situate this group in a broader understanding of social reproduction in urban Nigeria. At the heart of the chapter lies young women’s recognition that they must live up to their parents’ expectations of becoming eligible ‘wife material’ but that this process is complicated by their desires to conform to particular cosmopolitan identities as well as by interferences coming from ‘the village’. The chapter details young women’s childhood memories and the domestic challenges faced by the ‘girl child’ in urban Nigeria, before moving on to describe the various strategies young women have for managing their reputations as they seek to have fun in the city and look towards a future shaped by marital responsibility. Illuminating how social reproduction in Calabar is governed by the tensions of visibility and invisibility, the chapter highlights how it is not only the boundaries of feminine respectability that start at home but also the ways in which feminine identities can be shaped by uncertainty.