Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

By Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Book Overview

Considers the meaning of gender in an African context.

The "woman question," this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures.

Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of "woman," central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles.

Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816624410
• ISBN13: 9780816624416
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Yoruba visions of Western Feminism

I read the 2003 edition of the 1997 book. It is about the Europeanization of African gender thought after direct colonialism, taking mostly the Nigerian Yoruba as an example. The author disposes of the Western standards of history, state and philosophy including the supposed African lack of all of that. She analyses the differences of Western feminism and pre- and post-colonial African matriarchies (or what's left of it). African hearing instead of European seeing at the top of the senses and the consequences of that; and mostly genderless Yoruba names. And why there is a sisterarchy between European and African feminists. While critizising the Western gender dichotomy, she is also not so fond of too radical homogenizing of female and male. A fresh light on polygamy will challenge the Western feminist. She avers homosexuality as a foreign concept to Africa, which clearly is a half-truth at best. The word and literal/direct concept is European, the fact that females and males developed various cultural norms of love, sexuality and sociability among themselves isn't exclusively so. Read for example Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities. In that context she fails to elaborate on the preclusion of sexuality when women may "inherit" other wives. Her neglect of this topic, turning it into a taboo, is clearly one of the weaker points of this book. I am also astonished to read vocabulary like "race" in THIS book, as the concept of races is even more European and in fact racist. Overall, however, this book is recommendable for those interested in the subject. Who may also be interested in Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy, Return to the African Mother Principle of Male and Female Equality, When Men Are Women: Manhood Among The Gabra Nomads Of East Africa, and more generally in The Mismeasure of Woman and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Revised Edition.

The invention of women

THis is an excellent book for anyone who wants to understand the importance and the view of yoruba women. This book is an eye opener for me. It allows me to be able to understand the truth about Yoruba view of arabinrin the anafemale.The book makes me proud of my origin as a omo Yoruda(a yoruba Child).

The best book I've read in years.

Oyewunmi goes into an area previously thought to be fully explored, and shatters all the presumptions in an indisputable fashion. The Yoruba 'woman' has been steeped in the image of her Western counterpart by people who never tried hard enough to find out her true roles and social functions in pre-colonial times. This book is written with a great deal of intuitiveness, depth and logic. It is painstakinly researched and thorough, yet imminently readable. It's the best book I've read in years.