Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey

Edna Bay's Wives of the Leopard, published by the University of Virginia Press in 1998, is a scholarly study of gender, politics and culture in the kingdom of Dahomey, examining the roles royal wives held within the court and state. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic monograph grounded in archival and oral historical research on a state whose internal politics are comparatively underdocumented in English language scholarship. Its limit is that its evidentiary base includes oral tradition recorded well after the events it describes, so a claim resting on a specific dated event within Dahomey's history should be checked against the documentary record where one exists.