Zambia obtained its independence from British colonial rule in 1964. While significant portions of historiography focus on how the struggle was predominantly fought by men, some more recent literature examines the various ways in which women contributed to the movement. This paper re-examines women’s participation in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s and early 1960s by taking a cue from the development studies theories of women in development, women and development, and gender and development (WID, WAD and GAD respectively). The paper uses primary interviews and archival sources to focus on specific woman-led protests and their participants to investigate how women contributed to the struggle. It assesses the ways historians have portrayed women’s participation in decolonisation through specific lenses, critiquing the historiographical framing of women’s roles in the movement. I assert that the existing literature compartmentalises women’s contributions into political and non-political endeavours, and this limits how we can understand their work. This paper addresses the question of how we can better understand women’s contributions to the Zambian independence movement by realising that historiography has framed female labour in terms of reflecting the WID and WAD paradigms and by reframing the narratives through a lens reflective of the GAD paradigm. I argue that we can see how women’s labour has been characterised in ways that prevent us from seeing the larger picture: that both men’s and women’s work were essential to dismantling colonialism. I argue that a gendered lens, which views male and female contributions together, is necessary to a comprehensive understanding of the movement.

赞比亚于 1964 年从英国殖民统治下获得独立。虽然史学的重要部分集中在斗争如何主要由男性进行，但最近的一些文献研究了女性为这场运动做出贡献的各种方式。本文以妇女在发展、妇女与发展、性别与发展（分别为 WID、WAD 和 GAD）的发展研究理论为线索，重新审视妇女在 1950 年代和 1960 年代初期的反殖民运动中的参与。该论文使用主要采访和档案资源来关注特定的女性领导的抗议活动及其参与者，以调查女性如何为斗争做出贡献。它评估了历史学家通过特定镜头描绘妇女参与非殖民化的方式，批评女性在运动中角色的历史框架。我断言，现有文献将女性的贡献划分为政治和非政治努力，这限制了我们对她们工作的理解。本文解决了我们如何才能更好地理解妇女对赞比亚独立运动的贡献的问题，即通过认识到史学已经根据反映 WID 和 WAD 范式的方式构建了女性劳动，并通过反映 GAD 范式的镜头重新构建了叙述。我认为，我们可以看到女性劳动的特征如何阻止我们看到更大的图景：男性和女性的工作对于消除殖民主义都是必不可少的。我认为，一个性别视角，将男性和女性的贡献放在一起，