The Concept of Womanhood: Revisiting the Precolonial Nigerian Woman
Abstract
Womanhood is a concept that has attracted an intensive scholarly gaze spanning multiple disciplines. The focus here is on womanhood as imagined, and demonstrated in the Nigerian milieu. In different historical epochs from pre-colonial to post–colonial Nigeria, the production of knowledge about women was and continues to be essentialized, contested and negotiated. It is the aim of this paper to show the problematic ‘woman’ in pre-colonial Nigerian society. The dictionary definition of womanhood describes it as “a state or condition of being a woman”. The question this begs is what does it mean to be a woman? Do women have a commonality as observed in the case of people of the same race? Efforts to answer this question throw up the definitional murkiness of the ‘woman space’. The complexity of the category “woman” is seen in the different meanings attached to it historically, from the philosophical constructions of the woman in classical antiquity as an ‘underdeveloped man’; to the Victorian woman as ‘the angel in the house’, the domesticated wife; the colonized woman as hapless victim in need of saving and the postcolonial narrative of womanhood as one of difference in performance. Given that womanhood as a performative act is context specific, this paper revisits the precolonial Nigerian woman, in her complexity and knowledge production. The work adopts intersectionality as its theoretical framework to understand the crisscrossing of social, and political identities, roles and duties of women in pre-colonial Nigeria and how they experienced being a woman from different positions of power and social status. The paper contributes to the literature on African women.
References
2. Allen, A. T. (2005). Feminism and motherhood in Western Europe (1890-1970): The maternal Dilemma: New York (NY). United States of America: Palgrave Macmillian.
3. Awuor, A. (Dec. 15, 2021). Learning the difference between womanhood and motherhood. The Standard.
4. Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex. New York: Bantam, 1961
5. Deranty, J.-P. (2000). The “Son of Civil Society”: Tensions in Hegel’s Account of Womanhood. The Philosophical Forum, 31(2), 145–162. doi:10.1111/0031-806x.00033
6. Egejuru, P. A. (1997). The paradox of womanbeing and the female principle in Igbo cosmology in Egejuru, Phanuel A. and Katrak, Ketu H. (eds.). Nwanyibu: Womanbeing and African Literature Trenton, New Jersey (NJ) USA: Africa World Press.
7. Greene, S. E. (1991). Family concerns: Gender and ethnicity in pre-colonial West Africa International Review of Social History 44, Supplement, pp. 15-31 ©
8. Hillesheim, E., & Shykoff, J. (1991). Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1989. Sexual Science: The Victoria Construction of Womanhood. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 245 pp., $25.00. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 4(1), 164–165. doi:10.1046/j.1420-9101.1991.4010164.x
9. Hooks, B. (2015). Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. London: Routlege
10. Hooks, B. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. 2nd edition. London: Pluto Press.
11. Hughes, T. & Mastantuono (March 10, 2020). What being a woman means to us this International Women’s Day: The women of Queens reflect on the beauty of our identities. The Queen’s University Journal. https://www.queensjournal.ca/story/2020-03-10/student-life/what-being-a-woman-means-to-us-this-international-womens-day/
12. Kanogo, T. (2005). African womanhood in colonial Kenya 1900—1950. Eastern African Studies Series. Oxford, UK: James Currey
13. Kies, S. M. (2013). Matriarchy, the colonial situation, and the women's war of 1929 in southeastern Nigeria. Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations. 537. http://commons.emich.edu/theses/53
14. Makinde, J. T. (2004). Motherhood as a source of empowerment of women in Yoruba. Nordic science. Journal of African Studies. 13(2):164-174.
15. Ogbomo, O. W., and Q. O. Ogbomo. (1993). Women and society in pre-colonial Iyede.” Anthropos, vol. 88, no. 4/6, 1993, pp. 431–441. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40463751
16. Olayiwola, A. and Olowonmi, A. (2013). Mothering children in Africa: Interrogating single parenthood in African literature Abiodun Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 25
17. Oloruntoba-Oju, O. & Oloruntoba-Oju, T. (2013). Models in the construction of female identity in Nigerian postcolonial TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 50 (2) • DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v50i2.1
18. Oyewumi, O. (1997). The Invention of Women. U.S.A.: University of Minnesota Press
19. Rogers, M. L. (1978). Fascinating womanhood as a regression in the emotional maturation of women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2(3), 202–214. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1978.tb00503.x
20. Russett, C. E. (1989). Sexual science: Victorian construction of womanhood. United States of America: First Harvard University Press.
21. Settles, I. H., Pratt-Hyatt, J. S., & Buchanan, N. T. (2008). through the lens of race: Black and white women’s perceptions of womanhood. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32(4), 454–468. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2008.00458.x
22. Sikoki, T. (2014). Shedding light on the dark: Interrogating representations of Africa and its women in FEMME FATALE: Deconstructing the politics of sexuality female artists exhibition and workshop.
23. Taylor, Y., Hines, S., and Casey, M. E. (Eds.). (2010). Theorizing intersectionality and sexuality. England, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
24. Yusuf, B. B. (2004). Yorubas don’t do gender: A critical review of Oyeronke Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women: Making an African sense out of Western gender discourse in African Gender Scholarship. Codesria: Codesria Gender Series
25. Zakaria, Y. (2001). Entrepreneurs at home: Secluded Muslim women and hidden economic Activities in Northern Nigeria by University of Uppsala, Sweden. Nordic Journal of African Studies 10 (1): pp. 107-123
In submitting the manuscript to the International Journal on Integrated Education (IJIE), the authors certify that:
- They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- The work described has not been formally published before, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, thesis, or overlay journal.
- That it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
- The publication has been approved by the author(s) and by responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out.
- They secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere.
- They agree to the following license and copyright agreement.
License and Copyright Agreement
Authors who publish with International Journal on Integrated Education (IJIE) agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the International Journal on Integrated Education (IJIE) right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors can enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the International Journal on Integrated Education (IJIE) published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or edit it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) before and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
1.png)
