Title: Tubman Talks with Dr. Mary Uhunoma Isibor: Sacrifice and Survival: Benin Women Entrepreneurs, Forced Labor, and Family Support during the 1980s Structural Adjustment
Date: Thursday, January 22, 2026
Time: 2:30pm - 4:00pm EST
Location: Tubman Resource Room (314 York Lanes)
In-Person Registration: https://research.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=285408
Zoom Registration: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/mITCKMY7QICEtMxL2jkynw
Title: Sacrifice and Survival: Benin Women Entrepreneurs, Migration, and Family Support during the 1980s–1990s
Abstract: This paper examines how women from Benin City, Nigeria, negotiated economic crisis, gender expectations, and migration to sustain their families during the era of structural adjustment. Drawing on oral histories and archival materials, it traces women’s movement from petty trading into large-scale entrepreneurship and, in some case, migration abroad as a family survival strategy. While their remittances and business activities transformed households from poverty to relative wealth, these gains often came with significant personal costs, including delayed education, postponed marriage, emotional strain, and exposure to unsafe working and travel conditions. By placing women’s voices at the center, the paper shows how sacrifice, obligation, and resilience shaped everyday life and redefined ideas of responsibility within families. The analysis highlights the tension between empowerment narratives and the hidden burdens women carried, offering new insight into gender, migration, and development in late twentieth-century Nigeria.
Keywords: Benin City, women entrepreneurs, migration, structural adjustment, family survival, remittances, gender, resilience, Nigeria, development
Bio: Mary Uhunoma Isibor, is a faculty member of the Department of History and International Studies at the University of Benin, Nigeria, and a Postdoctoral/Visiting Research Scholar with the Harriet Tubman Institute at York University. Her work explores how ordinary women build economies in extraordinary ways. She studies gender and economic history, entrepreneurship, migration, and diaspora life, paying close attention to the everyday forms of labor that rarely make it into the archives or public memory.
Her earlier research traced how women in Benin City moved from petty trading into international business, showing how their hustle, networks, and quiet leadership sustained households, shaped markets, and influenced community life. Rather than seeing these women as simply “helping,” her work reveals them as economic thinkers, risk takers, and creators of opportunity.
Her current project focuses on African and Black migrant women entrepreneurs in Canada. She examines how they navigate unfamiliar systems, start and grow businesses, care for families across borders, and build a sense of belonging while carrying the emotional and financial weight of migration. Through interviews, life stories, and community engagement, her research brings forward voices that are often overlooked, highlighting how women’s everyday work holds communities together and reimagines what resilience really means.
Across her scholarship, Mary is committed to centering lived experience, challenging narrow ideas about who drives economic change, and showing how women’s labour, in all its visible and invisible forms, shapes history.
