Teacher Trainees in Ghana in the Early 1960s

Prologue¹

Young women were presented with unprecedented opportunities and challenges in the newly independent Ghana of the early 1960s. In their own words, a small group of teacher trainees reflect on how their upbringings and early education prepared them for the challenge of making a place for themselves in a society where rapid transition to western style modernity and resilient traditional values coexisted in uneasy rivalry, often mediated by vestiges of colonialism. Relying on interviews with their former teachers, archival sources, and autobiographies, this article examines three aspects of these women’s lives: their use of critical thinking skills—developed in a school curriculum discouraging critical thought; the influence of families on school achievement; and their assessment of future life and career aspirations.

The Household Survey

Assistance from the West and the United Nations came to many newly independent African countries in the late 1950s and 1960s.¹¹ The Comell-Ghana Project, designed to assist in establishing a Home Science curriculum for training future secondary school teachers in teacher training colleges, was one such project. The project site, Winneba Teacher Training College, was a small institution 30 miles along the coast from Accra, Ghana’s capital.

Professor Harold Feldman, of Cornell University’s Child and Family Studies Department, led the effort to build up a contemporary data base on family practices and structure. Feldman’s first brief trip to Ghana in March of 1963 convinced him of the need for research at several levels. Rapid change in Ghanaian society suggested that emphasis be placed on the continual process of data collection rather than on “received” knowledge.¹² During his preliminary visit to Winneba in 1963, Feldman assigned students in the Housecraft Diploma course, home visits to collect survey data on families.

In March of 1963 eleven students in Winneba’s Housecraft Diploma course were asked to each undertake two visits to local households, during which they were to survey families on a variety of topics.¹³ Feldman had quickly found that family in the western sense was a less useful term than household, which better articulated complex economic relations such as planning and income allocation, carried out among kin and non-kin alike within households.¹⁴ The twenty-two families surveyed, subsequently grouped by educational level (Groups One, Two, Three) were comprised of 182 persons, including children, stepchildren, extended relatives, servants and individuals with no specific relationship to families.¹⁵ The nine families comprising Group One, had husbands and wives that had at least attended middle school. All the husbands and three of the wives had professional occupations. Group Two consisted of five families in which only the husband had attended middle school. Here, husbands and wives, with the exception of two husbands who were teachers, held semi-skilled occupations. In the eight Group Three families, neither spouse had attended middle school, and both spouses worked in semi-skilled occupations. Within the three groups, all the wives listed occupations and only one Group One wife listed “Housewife” as an occupation.

Feldman’s students queried the female heads of households, taking at least an hour to complete an individual survey. In general, women from the most educated grouping of nine households were quickly adopting modem practices and conveniences, in part because of knowledge, and in part because of their ability to afford such practices.¹⁶ Better educated women were far more likely to have sinks with running water, use soap powder (rather than cake soap) for laundry, and own and use sewing machines (all women in Groups One and Two owned them). Of the nine Group One households, three sent out the husband’s laundry, the rest being done at home. Group One women also advocated the shortest length of time for breast feeding (10.1 months), compared to Group Two Women (12.6 months), and Group Three women (12.4 months).

The survey found better educated households consuming a wider variety of foods such as meat, rice and breads, in addition to the staples of fufu and fish, but no differences in the amount of food purchased by education level. Fourteen of the 22 households purchased all their food stuffs, a remarkable finding given the practice of supplementing market purchases with some food production. It is striking that women in the two higher educational groups reported spending 4.5 hours per day preparing meals, with less educated women reporting only 3 hours spent in this activity. The convenience and labor saving advantages of the sewing machine apparently had no correspondence with similar innovations in meal preparation. Most families reported using several methods of cooking food, but only Group One households used gas, kerosene, or electricity for cooking.

All households reported desiring separate housing for their nuclear families, but only four households had achieved it, two from the most educated segment and two from the least. Enjoying such amenities as mosquito- proofed bedrooms, electric lighting and refrigerators, was left only to Group One households. Four households from Group One had flush toilets and all had radios. For Group One men, solitary activity involving the maintenance of home and property was the primary form of recreation. Less educated men preferred leisure with social contact, perhaps reflecting the solitary nature of their daily occupations. (Neither husbands nor wives mentioned spouses in recreation.) For women in all groups, sewing for the family was the most frequently mentioned form of recreation with participation in social activities next. Preference among better educated households for western style clothing was pronounced, with strong preference for Ghanaian style clothing found only among the least educated group. Only one Group One woman preferred Ghanaian style dress. In a country whose leaders were keen on instilling a sense of national identity, the growing importance of English and preference for western dress were interesting contradictions.

The occupational aspirations of mothers for their oldest children, also a survey item, are particularly telling. As Feldman noted, mothers’ aspirations were usually higher then the actual occupation of their husbands. Regardless of the educational level of parents, the model expectation for boys was entry into the professions. Mothers’ aspirations for girls were more correlated with the occupational level of fathers. For the two better educated groups, as Feldman put it, [the] “… wife seems to adopt the upward mobility of her husband in her expectation for her daughter.” All daughters in the sample were expected to work.

The survey unfortunately did not separate out occupational aspirations by educational group. But even in the aggregate, for boys mothers in time hoped to launch 7 engineers, 4 doctors, 3 teachers and 2 clerks. For girls, mothers hoped for a doctor, a pharmacist, an airline hostess, three nurses, four teachers, three seamstresses, two clerks, and a farmer. With 14 of the 22 families having at least one parent who was a middle school graduate, the awareness of new possibilities for children is not surprising. Philip Foster, in his classic study Education and Social Change in Ghana (1965), gave considerable attention to interpreting student aspirations in the context of economic issues and the rapid expansion of the educational system and the effects of examinations. In this economic environment, scholars proving unsuccessful, or whose families could not afford to advance their scholastic careers, faced certain unemployment.¹⁷

Feldman’s students asked mothers what they expected their child might become once they left school.¹⁸ Their responses reflect the mother’s aspirations, far different than asking children about their own expectations. Indeed, when asking children themselves to differentiate between free choice and realistic expectation in occupational choice, Foster got quite different answers.¹⁹ Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Africans were obsessed with obtaining white-collar employment, Foster found half the students wanted jobs as artisans and skilled workers, and only 30 percent sought the professions, teaching or clerical and allied occupations. When asked what they might realistically obtain, only 22.4 percent thought they would become artisans or skilled workers, with 10.9 percent believing they would get into the professions or teaching. A full 35.2 percent thought they would become semi-skilled or unskilled workers, in contrast to less than four percent when the question was posed in terms of occupational choice. More students (3.8 percent) thought they would end up as teachers than those (0.9 percent) who aspired to the teaching profession. This last finding reflected a diminution in status of the teaching profession, ironically due to the expansion of education. The research of both Foster and Feldman, although different in scope and intent, underscores the uncertainties of occupation and employment, and how social class and economic well being, were becoming increasingly tied to educational attainment.

When asked what they had learned from the household survey assignment, Feldman’s students were quite critical of their interview families, reflecting a top-down conception of the teacher’s role. “They focused on efficiency when the people wanted privacy and some gaiety in their lives,” Feldman remarked.²⁰ These students had little empathy with the daily problems of their householders, and were annoyed by deviance from their perception of “sound household practices,” and the householder’s refusal to accept advice. In subsequent discussions, the students evinced little grasp of how practical issues faced by families were related to broader social problems or differing opportunities for Home Science. This insistence on transmitting knowledge without dialogue or reflectivity was consistent with their own educational experiences. As future teachers, they seemed destined to impart technical knowledge and skills, but without communicating or encouraging consideration of the broadest range of uses to which education might be put by their students and communities.

The reaction of these future teachers to their assignment intrigued Feldman. Their attitudes toward the clientele with whom they would most likely be working seemed ambivalent. Why did they want to become teachers, if that was even the case? Providing guidelines for format and content, Feldman assigned his students short autobiographies in an effort to learn more about them. Written at school in 1963, these autobiographies survive in their original typed, single-spaced standardized form of about three pages each.²¹

Student Autobiographies

The recounting of life stories often involves working through the tension between structure and agency as individuals strive to shape an imaginative and instrumental version of the self.²² These autobiographies are written in English, essential for academic success, but not the first language of these students, or the one most likely spoken at home.²³ The degree of individual fluency was influenced by the ethnic composition of one’s school. Students from a common ethnic group could quickly switch to their vernacular language outside of school, while students drawn from different parts of the country or different ethnic groups would be inclined to rely on English as a common language, thus achieving a higher level of proficiency. In this instance, the students are proficient in English but their language is often stilted and nuances of meaning and feeling are lost. English was the language of officialdom, correct, precise and public. Akan, Ga, and Ewe, were the languages of home, social life, and nuanced self-expression. Thus important aspects of these young women’s feelings and thoughts remain invisible.²⁴ Numbers have been assigned to each autobiography as an ethical safeguard preserving anonymity.²⁵ The passages selected for illustration and analysis were edited for brevity’s sake, especially where unrelated ideas or comments were interspersed in the text.

Some indication of how students took awareness of audience into account in writing these narratives comes to us through their self-reports of satisfaction with strong group rapport and camaraderie among students. Narratives build around stories familiar to the participants, often foster group rapport, ratify group membership and convey group values.²⁶ Students may well have been familiar with one another’s life stories, and agreed either explicitly or less formally on how to go about writing and editing their life stories. Clearly, the values they convey are similar. Feldman was adept at developing a genuine rapport with his students, and the open quality of the writing counters the notion that students’ crafted their essays to meet Feldman’s expectations.²⁷ There is however a notable absence of commentary on the nature of educational institutions, many of whom, including the Winneba Teacher Training College, were still run by British expatriate staff. Only one writer refers to race, using the term “Europeans,” to describe whites, and only one person identifies a colonial institution, the Cocoa Marketing Board, which she put in quotation marks. Thus if students were candid about their early upbringing and schooling, they were aware of the structural tensions in their present situation.

These life histories are revealing. Of these eleven female students, eight were either the first born or the oldest daughter of the family, one was the youngest and two did not specify. Seven had been in another type of teacher training course, and half had prior teaching experience as teacher-pupils. Young children in the mid-1940s, their average age in 1963 was 25. Only one woman had lived continually with her parents growing up. Ten of the students had been cared for intermittently by extended households and boarding schools, due to death, family crises or work related obligations of parents in another part of the country. Unusually high rates of geographic mobility in Ghanaian society were a response to pressures of employment.²⁸ Nine of these girls had at least one parent who was a teacher, low-level civil servant or minister, the rest were traders or agriculturalists. Family sizes ranged from modest extended families of 7–15 members, consisting of parents, children and a few relatives, to large differentiated households. A chiefs household included “… servers, horn blowers and … chief’s souls …”, swelling to over 40 persons at meal times. Another household also had over 40 members. Thus most of these women came from homes equivalent in education and occupation to the Group One and Group Two households of the Housecraft Survey.

The autobiographies revealed that geographic separation of daughters from parents and siblings was often substantial, reflecting the growing importance of wages in the economy, and the practical hardships that such arrangements required. One of the unusual strengths of these households was the degree to which grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, in-laws, and even unrelated householders, could be mobilized for active child rearing.

In an age in which marital dissolution and fracturing of families have reached alarming proportions in Western societies, it is tempting to romanticize extended households elsewhere. Living in extended arrangements was not always happy or conflict free. The uniqueness of these women as young girls created controversy over what constituted appropriate child rearing practices. As these girls often occupied key positions in birth order, they participated in the reciprocal emotional and social relationships that bound adult family members and children together. As first daughters for 5 mothers, an “only child” for a maiden aunt with child rearing responsibilities, and oldest daughters of several widowed fathers, they were friends and companions, symbolic markers on life’s highway. One student gained distinction as a first granddaughter, while another, raised in a chief’s household with 15–20 children, was one of the few natural children of the household. Each was recognized as special in some way. They were nurtured, pampered and often excused from the usual duties of cleaning, cooking and childcare, assigned to children in such households. As these students recounted:

I was the second child … but the first one [a boy] … died a few months after I arrived. I spent the first two years with my Parents … then I went to live with my aunt. She had no child of her own. They treated me with … indulgence. I became almost a spoilt child. My mother did not like it very much but could not say it for fear she would hurt my aunt. My mother was very strict … we were almost afraid to ask her anything.²⁹

I … stayed at Cape Coast with my grandmother, four aunts and three uncles. These did everything they could to maintain my health and make me happy. I did not know my parents till I reached Primary three. … My mother used to beat me and treat me harshly whenever she visited us although she sent me a lot of clothes. I was doing practically nothing at home, my aunts petted me a lot and they never commented on my faults … and so I thought my mother was an unkind woman who used to pay us some visits sometimes. Nevertheless, I usually wept whenever she was ready to leave.³⁰

Academic prowess reinforced exemption from household duties too, and conflicts arose over the wisdom of these exemptions. Daughters provide an important source of labor within the home, and such work was also an apprenticeship for assuming adult responsibilities in one’s own home. Caught in a social transformation in which educational attainment was increasingly important, some parents and guardians thought it best to put traditional child rearing practices aside in favor of what they perceived as the looming demands of a changing society. This change in child rearing was controversial. As these students recalled:

My aunts did everything for me at home. I … attended [school] ate and either went out to play or went to sit with my grandma who was very old then. … I led a very free life … apart from … school. I did not do anything at home. My grandma died in 1947 and my mother came to stay with us at Cape Coast as my father was transferred to the north. … during this time I received my home training. I was not uncouth though but I did not know anything about … keeping the home tidy and so she made me practice these things. I usually wept whenever she asked me to grind vegetables and wash used utensils. I thought she was being unkind … but afterwards I realized that she was rather doing me good.³¹

My father took up an appointment at Nkawkau … and so my parents left the big family and my brother and myself were left behind. I was the favorite of my step grandfather and my brother was the favorite of my grandfather [who] loved us so much that he devoted all his time to us. He bathed us. There were many servants … so at the age of ten, I could neither bath myself nor wash my things. Every teacher who maltreated us was checked by my grandpa so no teacher minded us even though we were late to classes. [After a parental separation, the children left their grandfather to attend a school where their mother taught.] … My mother used strong hands on me because I was lazy and I was taught to do many things.³²

The teachers thought I was so good that I was moved one class ahead of my mates. This made my father so proud … that he did not want me to work at home so I could get more time to read. My mother did not like the idea that I should not help with the household duties; this ended with a long argument [and] I was sent to a boarding school. I was then ten years. Things continued to be pleasant at school but at home … mother made me work so hard I never enjoyed holidays. I did the cooking, laundry and other odd jobs when the family became large. Not that I did not want to work but I wanted to work in a happy atmosphere.³³

As these accounts suggest, privilege and exemption, whatever their origin, came with the price of conflict with competing adults values—often personified by mothers. From the student’s own accounts, none of their mothers wanted them to be primarily housewives. This view is paralleled by the student’s household surveys; only one of the fourteen Group One and Two mothers put down “housewife” as a career aspiration for a daughter.³⁴ But mothers, attuned to the traditional responsibilities of marriage and family, were concerned that there be a balance between modem education, occupational aspirations and traditional socialization.

For most students memories of schooling and family life were mixed, punctuated by school changes, the need to relocate and the death of parents, care givers and loved ones. The only ever-married student had lost her husband in a trucking accident a year and half after their marriage. Left with an infant, this experienced teacher was nonetheless freed from her husband’s desire that she not work or attend the housecraft diploma course. Interestingly, one of her motivations for study was the healing value of the college setting, and she was encouraged in this by fellow students. Only one student discussed a parent’s death in detail, all the seven others mention deaths in a single sentence although these losses often brought substantial changes to their lives.

… one of the boys in my father’s home came to the school and called my father’s other two brothers … then called me too. … I asked why they were weeping and where we were going, but the answer I got was “we are going home” from the older uncle. We … found everybody outside of the house. … I overheard some women … expressing … sympathy for my father. I did not understand, then … my mother’s best friend came into our house weeping bitterly, calling out my mother’s name. Then I realized my mother was dead. … the last time I saw my mother was when she was leaving us to have her fourth baby.³⁵

Substantially abridged here, this account of a mother’s death is unusual in that this student devotes nearly half a single-spaced page to its retelling. The death is a prelude to an unhappy stint at a boarding school followed by a much happier reestablishment at her old school, and the introduction of a stepmother into the family. This recounting of educational progress is also the story of a ten year old’s deep loss, her father’s remarriage, and developing an affectionate relationship with a step-mother. In contrast, one is less certain of what to make of this single sentence pronouncement. “Everybody was shocked one morning when we woke up to see our great grandmother dead on her bed at age of 119.”³⁶ Here, perhaps was an important milestone in a family history although not necessarily connected to personal development.

Then there is the school experience itself. Teachers varied widely in their skill and knowledge levels, compassion for pupils and the amount of personal interest they took in their charges. In those few instances where a parent was attached to the same school as a daughter, the student’s experiences tended to be happy. But a happy experience at one school might not be repeated at another. Corporal punishment or its threat was common. Without much direct family support, students developed resilience against school bullies, unfair teachers and unfamiliar surroundings, including unwelcome encounters with snakes and monkeys. All the while there was the pressure of their studies, and looming examinations which could determine the direction of their life course.

Most of the eleven students provide detail in recounting their previous school experiences, distinguishing between the scholastic and social aspects of schooling. Under the shadow of influential examinations, relations with one’s teachers and being able to rely on assistance from fellow students were important. If discouraged from critical inquiry in their school subjects, students exercised critical reflection in evaluating their teachers and schools. Here the relationship between agency and institution as a subtext is quite personalized, and centered on social justice and morality.

I stopped liking Latin … because the teacher was not sympathetic at all with us. She did not have the patience to teach us slowly and she always squeezed her face. Most of us were scared of her and we often gave wrong answers to the simplest questions. I had to stop taking Latin in form three when we were choosing our subjects for the school certificate because I had a very bad foundation.³⁷

I was on good terms with most of the teachers but some of them like the mathematics teacher was always picking a quarrel with me about mathematics. Some of them were very nice to me and at times go [sic] to the extremes in favoring me. I liked this in those days but I now realize how dangerous such behavior is. [from the view of alienating fellow students]³⁸

… every teacher liked me and I liked … them except one. This teacher liked me but I did not like her because she was always trying to find faults … and … give bad impressions about people … even when she knew she was not right.³⁹

The … nuns who ran the school were very wicked and strict disciplinaries [sic] so it was with iron hands that they ruled us. There was hardly any moment of happiness for us, for fear of being punished unnecessarily … I prayed very hard to get out of the convent … and my prayer was answered when I was offered a place at Achimota Secondary School …⁴⁰

In a few short pages accorded them, these 11 students recounted the significant experiences of their lives to date. Only one student presented an entirely rosy picture of life, especially her present situation. For most the picture that emerges is of a life alternating between periods of relative happiness and stressful difficulties and anxieties about their futures. In their times at school, the commitment of families, expressed through letters, visits, presents etc., were strengths that sustained and encouraged these students in environments lacking sustained nurturing and support.

Some students openly expressed ambivalence about their present studies. There was universal agreement that overcrowding and poorly appointed housing (6–7 to a room) made life difficult. This too was a critical reflection of the perceived disparity between what students were taught about “modem living” and actual college conditions. More than half the students acknowledged the Housecraft Diploma Course as a second best option.

If proficiency in English presented a barrier for achieving higher levels of education for many, the University of Ghana’s requirement that applicants offer either Greek or Latin was beyond all but those with the most privileged secondary educations. Several Housecraft students had failed the University entrance exam and were doing Housecraft as a stop gap.

The rather wholesale importation of the Oxbridge Model into an incongruous setting left the university an easy target for critics. Dr. Robert July, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Africa Program Officer, visited the University College in 1960. Annoyed by the intellectual pretensions and detachment from everyday life of the institution, he was incensed that of 65 applicants who could not offer Latin or Greek for the qualifying exams, only 12 could be absorbed by the Sociology Department.

The others were turned loose … 43 young people of college caliber in a country hungry for trained people … when one questions the value of Greek or Latin … the remark is that … these are really the only subjects that train the mind properly, and Ghanaians would raise a fearful row if they were eliminated.⁴¹

For the privileged few attending the University, the standards were acceptable, forming an unbridgeable gap between their future prospects and those of their less educated countryman. Not surprisingly, when Domestic Science was added as a university department, there was difficulty in attracting B.A. students. Having met University entrance requirements, students sought lucrative careers in the professions.

For students in the Winneba Teacher Training College’s Housecraft Diploma course, options, if beneficial, were far more limited.

I kept on repeating to her [a cousin] that nursing was not my line … I was interested in needle work. … She handed me an advertisement of the Housecraft diploma entrance examination … and with joy I traveled to the principal. There is nothing in particular which I dislike or like, I enjoy everybody’s company but I become disturbed when somebody hates me personally. [This student left nursing school when, after refusing a ward master’s advances, she and another women were transferred to a Tuberculosis ward, where in time her companion came to test positive.]⁴²

I suffered financial difficulties at Achimota … to repeat the situation in the sixth form will bring worries … I thought … any woman who is fully equipped with knowledge about housecraft is a blessing to … family, society, and the whole world … , so I sat for the entrance exam … there is nothing I like very much about the college except … meeting interesting students and getting to exchange views and ideas … that we have not been provided with facilities which enable us to practice what we learn e.g. no hot water in the halls for washing clothes, being given the wrong cutlery to eat with in the dining hall, etc. makes me dislike the college at times.⁴³

Students made the best of it and enjoyed staff and student company. As Dr. Kathleen Rhodes, a Cornell faculty member, recalls, there was universal belief in the usefulness of the skills students were being taught, especially for serving ones’ community and the needs of other women.⁴⁴

With many having prior experience as lower form pupil-teachers, would they as mature women, unmarried, still want to teach? Repeatedly in the autobiographies, Feldman found the answer was “yes,” as this student sums up:

Working as a housewife has always attracted me. I decided to come here so that after learning housecraft, I could teach and make others interested … many people may learn and practice how to live economically, in health and enjoy life to the best. If one is healthy, she can endeavor to do everything she wants to do and good health starts from the home—good feeding and cleanliness are the key.⁴⁵

Acquiring Housecraft skills was also frequently mentioned in the context of one’s own [future] marriage and responsibilities as a housewife. In Ghanaian society, as in the rest of Africa, marriage and children remain central expectations in the lives of young women. It is striking that for most of these students the concept of teaching as a profession is detached from the acquisition of Housecraft skills. Teaching offered new opportunities and posed practical dilemmas.⁴⁶

It was surely not lost on these women, especially those experiencing the death of a parent or caregiver in childhood, that teaching provided economic security. In the event of marital disruption, the Housecraft Diploma also provided an element of independence within a changing social structure. Mutual consent marriages, at one time identified with the lower classes, were steadily increasing in number as traditionally formalized marriages regulated by extended kinship networks decreased.⁴⁷ Between 1960 and 1987, the proportion of households in Ghana formally headed by women also increased from 22 to 29 percent. Fifty percent of that increase occurred in a single decade, 1960–1970.⁴⁸ With women disadvantaged in gaining access to land, credit, ownership of housing, and education, being educated and eligible for salaried employment, were important advantages. The government’s promotion of Home Science as an educational and governmental career placed these students as new occupational cohorts from which they could draw strength through personal and professional association with other women.⁴⁹ Post-secondary education, if it offered independence, also increased one’s eligibility in the marriage market.

Educated men look for wives of some education. Some choose brides from girls still at school. And … are expected to contribute towards the cost of their education until it is completed. Some pay for them to take a training course in domestic science.⁵⁰

As these Housecraft Diploma students sought to expand women’s roles in Ghanaian Society, by implication they also sought accommodation with the traditional structure of marriage. Changes since the 1930s had altered some of the formalities of traditional marriage, but had not yet reached into gender relations. For even educated men, accepting Western style marriage and monogamy in principle did not rule out maintaining traditional prerogatives, powers and loyalties, in practice.⁵¹ If men sought wives capable of absorbing and reinforcing their own Western style upward mobility, this did not necessarily signal a willingness to emphasize conjugal over traditional lineage obligations (whether patrilineal or matrilineal), or to share conjugal power and resources.⁵²

Western style marital structures tended to shift obligations to the nuclear family, and away from extended kin, difficult to accept for men schooled in the reciprocal obligations of kinship. The assumption that one’s personal kinship obligations could be reduced through familial burden sharing or state sponsored social welfare initiatives, could have dire consequences for children’s education, the widowed and elderly parents dependent on the remittances of grown children.⁵³ Shifting focus and resources to the nuclear family invited both structural and interpersonal conflict. Women had to think through the complex trade-offs of shifting from lineage to more egalitarian nuclear family structure.⁵⁴

A nuclear family structure in itself was no guarantee of resources. Higher occupational and income levels among traditionally oriented men might actually translate into husbands sharing fewer resources with spouses.⁵⁵ With women with children operating as a subsystem within the family, women’s access to such resources as cash, knowledge, or opportunities to earn, really determined the levels of child welfare.

Meeting both kinship and family obligations (especially children’s education) stretched resources, encouraging planning if not consultative decision making between spouses. For families entering Ghana’s middle class through salaried employment, reliance on hired servants and extended family for childcare and household maintenance, were costly undertakings, especially in urban environments.⁵⁶ Clark describes a young family man declining a potentially lucrative inheritance because acceptance signaled willingness to raise and educate a maternal uncle’s ten surviving children.⁵⁷ The efficient use of resources in the home achieved greater self-reliance, and strengthening the individual family unit while diminishing dependence (and obligation) to extended kin. Paradoxically, the new opportunities being afforded Winneba’s Housecraft Diploma trainees and others like them, eroded the viability of the extended families and households that nurtured them as children.

The expansion of higher education in Home Science Education in Ghana opened social space for young women to institutionalize important concerns relating to families, allowing them to become the professional stewards of Home Science.⁵⁸ As important as the changes Home Scientists sought to bring about in nutrition, child rearing, home management and human relations were the hopes and anxieties they had about making a better place for women in Ghanaian society. Harnessing the strengths of the traditional African family as subsequent history has shown was an important and modestly successful process in this context.