One of the most enduring myths about Kenyan women is that they have a long tradition of gendered organising to achieve agreed goals. This myth is predominantly derived from the existence of age-set initiation rites in the precolonial period, when girls and boys were initiated into adulthood through a combination of cultural training, seclusion and (depending on the community) gendered circumcision ceremonies. Groups that passed through initiation rites at the same ceremony were given a name to delineate their age-set from others. These culturally generated groups were organised to achieve community goals, and they often supported each other as they progressed through life mile-stones at similar times. Substantial work by historians and anthropolo-gists has foregrounded the communal life of East African ethnic groups and their gendered social and political organisation. Fundamentally, these groups were generated through intergenerational cultural practices and worked to support and perpetuate the structures and values of ethnic communities.

The British colonial regime actively sought to remake this African tradition of gendered organisation to better suit the regulatory and labour needs of the colony. This process created new forms of gendered organisation that responded to the onerous demands of the regime. Latterly, two modern discourses – international human rights policy and members of the postcolonial African academy – have sought, in different ways, to claim the gendered organisation of women as a structure that is integral to African communal life.

I argue here that the motivations of women joining late-modern women’s organisations and community groups in Kenya are much more closely related to economic imperatives and poverty than to ‘traditional’ modes of women’s organisations. Further, drawing on interviews I conducted with Kenyan women, I interrogate key assumptions of both African women’s history and human rights policy literature that women have always collectively organised, that women naturally turn to each other for support and guidance, that Kenyan women all want the same rights and are working towards the realisation of these rights as a united group, and that women will be able to access their rights once they are educated about them. The expectations of modern women’s organisations are grounded in the colonial past, but they carry modern burdens.