Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2002)
ISSN: 1530-5686
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR IN AFRICA: "WOMAN = THE SECOND SEX?" ISSUES OF AFRICAN FEMINIST THOUGHT
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Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies (2002) ISSN: 1530-5686 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR IN AFRICA: "WOMAN = THE SECOND SEX?" ISSUES OF AFRICAN FEMINIST THOUGHT |
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Signe Arnfred
In a recent interview, Toril Moi, a distinguished figure in the contemporary re-launching of Simone de Beauvoir, confirms that there are two major ideas in de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. One idea is that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ The other is that “in all known societies, woman has always been looked upon as the other” (Wenche Larsen 2000: 82). This paper sets out to question and investigate the second statement Is it really so that in all known societies woman is and has always been looked upon as the other, the second sex? Looked upon – by whom? Does it have to be so forever? That “woman = the second sex” is a firmly grounded idea in the Western world is not up for discussion. But what about other parts of the world? What about Africa?
The point of the discussion is not empirical. The point is not to show whether places do exist where this a priori othering of women does not occur. The point is to open the mind to different ways of thinking about gender, and for different ways of analyzing gender relations. Freeing ourselves from old mindsets will allow us to envision new kinds of gender relations as we look toward the future – both the future of Africa and the future of ourselves as Western (men and) women.
Post-Enlightenment (i.e. modern) thinkers have described women’s position in all ages and in all places according to their own androcentric models, models which subordinate women. In this way, concepts rooted in the time and space of the thinker him/herself have been universalized. At the moment, both in Western feminist thought and in Western feminist politics, the idea that women are the second sex and that they are universally subordinated is very strong indeed. The argument in this paper is not that subordination of women does not take place. Of course it does, and increasingly so, and clearly, subordination and oppression of women should be fought against. The argument concerns lines of thinking and analysis: how and from which vantage points, in what kinds of theoretical/conceptual contexts, are women’s lives conceived and conceptualized? And what consequences do they have for strategy and politics?
When I take my point of departure in Simone de Beauvoir’s work, is it (a) because she very early and very decisively hammered the point of woman as the other, and (b) because in the last few years Simone de Beauvoir’s work has been enjoying a revival, which I find most undue. It is one thing to honour de Beauvoir for her brave and pioneering work in 1949. It is quite another to exalt her as a model thinker and source of inspiration now, fifty years later, when so much has happened in the world and in the field of feminist thought, including the rich influx of non-Western feminist thinking.
In her paper “Histories of a Feminist Future,” Elizabeth Grosz (2000) provides some lines of thinking which run parallel to my own. Where I want to introduce new lines of thinking in order to allow for re-analysis of African (and other) gendered realities, she talks about the need for feminist re-interpretations of history, in order to be able to develop perspectives for different futures. It is all about interpretations. Reality exists, but the ways in which this reality is interpreted are decisive for the ways in which strategies for the future can be developed. According to Grosz, “it is the present that writes the past rather than – as positivist historiography has it – the past that gives way to the present. This is not to say that the present is all that is left of the past; quite the contrary, the past contains the resources to much more than the present. Rather, it is only the interests of the present that serve to vivify or invigorate the past” (Grosz 2000: 1019, emphasis added).
Grosz is writing about “positivist historiography,” but she could be describing classical social anthropology (or social science in general, for that matter, including structuralism and Marxism), where “traditional societies” are seen exclusively as pre-stages for “modernity.” When non-Western societies are interpreted afresh, they can be seen to “contain resources to much more than the present,” i.e., to much more than the notion that modernity is the only possible goal of development. This idea, based on a Western model, is now advocated worldwide. I propose to apply this idea specifically to the field of gender relations.
Grosz, too deals with gender relations. Inspiration for imagining different gender relations may be found in the past, she says: “The past – a past no longer understood as inert or given – may help engender a productive future, a future beyond patriarchy. [...] Feminist history [...] enables other virtual futures to be conceived, other perspectives to be developed, than those that currently prevail” (Grosz 2000: 1018-19, emphasis added). Such inspiration may be found in the past – or in Africa, or elsewhere. It all depends on ways of seeing – which again, of course, depend on relations of power. Nevertheless it is possible – and necessary – to develop alternative lines of thinking. Grosz again: “I am interested in clearing a conceptual space such that an indeterminable future is open to women [...] A future yet to be made is the very lifeblood of political struggle, the goal of feminist challenge” (Grosz 2000: 1017, emphasis added).
I am also interested in “clearing a conceptual space” so that other futures become possible. A future yet to be made is the very lifeblood of political struggle. The point of the following critical discussion regarding “woman = the second sex” is to open the imagination for different and more livable feminist futures than the ones now on offer, which are embedded in the notions of modernity and development.
Just like positivist historiography, which interprets the past in its own image, so in a similar way modernity—including modern social science—has interpreted gender relations in non-Western (pre-modern) societies as lacking and incomplete as compared to the edition of “gender equality” which Western society sees as the apex of development as far as gender relations are concerned.
Modernity has many faces. For instance, in a country like Mozambique (a country which I have known quite well over a long span of time), the modernity of Portuguese colonialism by independence in 1975 was replaced by the modernity of Frelimo socialism, this again in the late 1980s being replaced by the World Bank-monitored neo-liberal market economy, which is still in vogue. These different editions of modernity—in spite of their evident divergences—nevertheless share a number of basic assumptions, three of the most important ones being the following:
a. They share the firm position of the male subject. A human being is a man, the male position is believed to be gender neutral. In this context woman becomes the other.
b. They share the basic paradigm of a uni-linear development from “tradition” to “modernity,” with the Western so-called “developed world” serving as the model for achievement.
c. They share the conception of African women (and Third World women in general) as being particularly oppressed and subordinated—and thus potential and, hopefully it is hoped, grateful receivers of the blessings of modernity.
Thus, embedded in the uni-linear and pre-packed notion of development is a pre-packed conception of gender relations: Woman as the other, as universally subordinated, and Third World women as subordinated par excellence. The general idea is that women’s subordination belongs to tradition and to the past, whereas women’s emancipation—or gender equality, as the current terminology has it—belongs to modernity and to the future.
Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking fits into this pattern. She protests against female subordination – but nevertheless she thinks along these very lines, interpreting the past in the light of the present, and casting women’s future in the model of men’s. When in the following sections I present a reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, my concern is not Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking in its own right, with its ambivalences and tensions, as much as it is Simone de Beauvoir as a spokesperson – a clever and very insightful spokesperson – for points of view rooted in the basic assumptions listed above. I do not say that all of de Beauvoir is work represents commonplace modernist thinking. De Beauvoir is a sophisticated and original thinker, and her work is anything but commonplace, especially considering the time when it was written. My point is that several of the unspoken assumptions on which her work is based are shared by other lines of thinking of her time, and even of today. Thus by digging out implicit assumptions of her work, points may be made regarding otherwise hidden aspects of the general assumptions taken for granted in broader trends of “modern” and “development” thinking regarding gender.
Simone de Beauvoir writes from and into a socialist tradition. By 1949, when The Second Sex was published, the United States had replaced the Soviet Union in her view as the land of hope and glory for women’s emancipation. The Second Sex was written partly while the author was romantically involved with the Chicago writer Nelson Algren. De Beauvoir’s visits to the United States are reflected in the book, especially in the last part, where she talks about the promising prospects of modernity as most developed in the USA: wage work and contraception (SdB 1949/1997: 689, 705). Regarding women’s emancipation, according to de Beauvoir, “things have begun to change only recently” (SdB 1949/1997: 21). With implicit reference to the United States she proclaims that “the free woman is just being born” 1 (SdB 1949/1997: 723). The line of thinking is as follows: Woman is enslaved by being “a victim of the species” (SdB 1949/1997: 52). This enslavement is expressed most clearly and inescapably in her capacity for procreation (SdB 1949/1997: 57, 705). Furthermore she (or the European middle-class women whose lives as described in literature and social science de Beauvoir draws upon for illustration of her points) is dependent on husbands and fathers for economical support. Emancipation thus presupposes control of procreation as well as economic independence. This is an agenda for women’s liberation/equality, which is promoted by socialism and neo-liberalism alike.
The transcendence/immanence line of thought, which SdB takes over from Sartre, is an obvious illustration of assumption (a) above: The male subject at centre stage. “Transcendence,” according to de Beauvoir, is all that is fun and worthwhile, creative, productive, and essentially human: transcendence is what distinguishes humans from animals and culture from nature. Transcendence is however, in Sartres’ and de Beauvoir’s edition, inherently male. De Beauvoir is aware of this, even if she does not seem to be aware of the excessively male, and even phallic, metaphors of her language when describing transcendence as the human condition par excellence: “Homo faber has from the beginning of time been an inventor: the stick and the club with which he armed himself to knock down fruits and to slaughter animals became forthwith instruments for enlarging his grasp upon the world [...] he set up goals and opened up roads toward them [...] To maintain he created; he burst out of the present, he opened the future” (SdB 1949/1997: 95). This movement of bursting out of the present, and of opening the future is always a movement forwards, upwards “given that the basic image of the project remains male erection and ejaculation” as acknowledged by Toril Moi (Moi 1994: 152).
As against this creative activity of the archetypical modern hero, “immanence” is described as passivity and repetition, the drudgery of daily housework in which giving birth, breastfeeding, and motherhood are included: “The woman who gave birth [...] did not know the pride of creation; she felt herself a plaything of obscure forces, and the painful ordeal of childbirth seemed a useless and even troublesome accident. But in any case, giving birth and suckling are not activities, they are natural functions; no project is involved; and that is why woman found in them no reason for a lofty affirmation of her existence – she submitted passively to her biological fate “ (SdB 1949/1997: 94, emphasis added). Women’s work is nothing but repetition and stagnation, not interesting at all from de Beauvoir’s point of view; motherhood is naturalized and trivialized, a passive submission to nature and biology. This is motherhood as seen by (European) men; not motherhood as seen by (African) women. The value hierarchy as established by de Beauvoir—or rather, the value hierarchy of male modernity, explicitly accepted and condoned, and even elaborated by de Beauvoir – leads her to proclaim that “it is not in giving birth but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills” (SdB 1949/1997: 95).
Even Toril Moi, who generally shows a great talent for eking interesting feminist interpretations out of de Beauvoir’s text, gives up on this one: Of The Second Sex, she says, “the idea of immanence appears as an irresistible magnet for an astonishing range of obsessional images of darkness, night, passivity, stasis, abandonment, slavery, confinement, imprisonment, decomposition, degradation and destruction. There is no appreciation here of the positive aspects of passivity: rest, recollection and tranquility are words that fail to emerge from Beauvoir’s pen” (Moi 1994: 154). Regarding de Beauvoir’s praising of killing as more human than giving birth, she calls it “perfectly logical—and utterly absurd” (Moi 1994: 154).
Obviously, to de Beauvoir, the way forward for women is to become as much as possible like men. Gender equality is explicitly defined in male terms: “The “modern’ woman accepts masculine values. She prides herself on thinking, taking action, working, creating on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them she declares herself their equal” (SdB 1949/1997: 727). Similarly, in much modern thinking on gender, including gender-and-development lines of thought, Man is the model.
However much de Beauvoir is quoted for her opening sentence to book 2 of The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” her work is in contradiction with itself on exactly this issue. On one hand she believes – and shows – how the conditions of women are socially determined. When women are squeezed, torn, and suffering, it is not because of menstruation and menopause, but because of the ways that society deals with womanhood. This is her official and conscious position.
I am convinced that the greater part of the discomforts and maladies that overburden women are due to psychic causes, as gynaecologists, indeed, have told me. Women are constantly harassed to the limit of their strength because of the moral tension I have referred to, because of all the tasks they assume, because of the contradictions among which they struggle. This does not mean that their ills are imaginary: they are as real and destructive as the situation to which they give expression. But the situation does not depend on the body; the reverse is true.” (SdB 1949/1997: 706)
On the other hand there is her whole attitude to and description of the female body. Its capacity for pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation is never seen as a positive potential, as a source of pleasure or pride, but only and always as a curse, a drag, and a burden. Toril Moi (whose reading of The Second Sex at this point corresponds to my own) gives a poignant summary:
For Beauvoir women are the slaves of the species. Every biological process in the female body is a ‘crisis’ or a ‘trial’, and the result is always alienation. Her list of troubles and pains experienced during menstruation is impressive, to say the least, ranging from high blood pressure, impaired hearing and eyesight to unpleasant smells, destabilization of the central nervous system, abdominal pains, constipation and diarrhoea (Second Sex 61). But the discomfort of menstruation pales in comparison to the horrors of gestation. [...] Pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding all undermine the women’s health and even put her life at risk: “Childbirth itself is painful and dangerous [...] Nursing is also an exhausting obligation [servitude]; [...] the nursing mother feeds the newborn at the expense of her own strength” (Second Sex 62-63). (Moi 1994: 165)
The fact of the female enslavement to the species is a recurrent theme, especially of the first part of The Second Sex. The human male is free to create and transcend, whereas
the female feels her enslavement more and more keenly, the conflict between her own interest and the reproductive forces is heightened. Parturition in cows and mares is much more painful and dangerous than it is in mice and rabbits [...] The woman is adapted to the needs of the egg rather than to her own requirements. From puberty to menopause woman is the theatre of a play that unfolds within her and in which she is not personally concerned. (SdB 1949/1997: 57, 60)
The idea conveyed here is “woman against her body”; from these descriptions it is abundantly clear that for women and their urge for transcendence the female body is a handicap. Obviously de Beauvoir cannot subscribe to Freud’s idea that “anatomy is destiny.” Thus she tries to convince herself that women’s situation does not depend on the body, and that the reverse is true—as indicated in the quote above. There is a shadow of doubt, however, as in the same context she confesses that “it is difficult to determine to what extent woman’s physical constitution handicaps her” (SdB 1949/1997: 706).
In my reading, de Beauvoir is insincere at this point. In her entire analysis, the female body remains a handicap which can only be overcome by minimizing it, which (fortunately) is increasingly possible thanks to (a) industrial development and suitable wage work opportunities for women, supplemented with child care facilities, and (b) contraceptives and other types of reproductive technology. If the contemporary possibilities of in vitro fertilization had been available, or even imaginable, in her time, I am sure that de Beauvoir would have embraced them as further steps on the road to female freedom. It is all contained within the logic of the female body as a handicap.
Regarding this model of female emancipation, socialism and liberalism by and large agree, as do large parts of the women’s movement that the notion that the female body is a handicap as persistent and pervasive as the idea of woman as the other. This idea is based of course on the assumption that the model body is male. But what if it isn’t? I assert, as do others with me, that it is time for feminist thought to overcome the phallocentric as well as the ethnocentric biases in this line of thinking.
Judith Butler’s attitude to de Beauvoir is critical, but also accepting. I see this ambivalence as reflecting the ambivalence in de Beauvoir’s own writing. I shall here focus on Butler’s critique of de Beauvoir, which supports and adds to my own. Being a philosopher herself, Butler places de Beauvoir in the context of European philosophy, focusing on the mind/body divide and its gendered connotations:
It appears that Beauvoir maintains the mind/body dualism, even as she proposes a synthesis of those terms. The preservation of that very distinction can be read as symptomatic of the very phallogocentrism that Beauvoir underestimates. In the philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues through Descartes, Husserl and Sartre, the ontological distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy. [...] The cultural associations of mind with masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within the field of philosophy and feminism. (Butler 1990/1999: 17)
Having accepted this implicitly hierarchical line of thinking, de Beauvoir also accepts the male/female hierarchy, setting man as the universal norm, and female as other. “For Beauvoir the ‘subject’ within the existential analytic of misogyny is always already masculine, conflated with the universal, differentiating itself from a feminine ‘Other’ outside the universalizing norms of personhood, hopelessly ‘particular’, embodied, condemned to immanence” (Butler 1990/1999: 16).
Butler pinpoints the mechanism of this implicit maneuver as disavowal and projection: the body, in Western thought, is disavowed—and at the same time projected onto women. Much of the emotional load of female subordination has its roots in this mechanism of disavowal and projection. “[The abstract, masculine, epistemological] subject is abstract to the extend that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female” (Butler 1990/1999: 16). Disavowal and projection, as Butler points out, are crucial parts of the mechanism in constructing others. “Others” are not there as produced by nature; “others” are constructed. This is true of “woman as other,” as well as of “third world as other” and of “third world woman as other.” And, as pointed out by Chandra Mohanty (1991: 74) cf. below constructions of otherness go along with constructions of self.
In her important paper “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Mohanty takes issue with the ethnocentricity of much Western feminist thought. Ethnocentricity is produced when
third world legal, economic, religious and familial structures are treated as phenomena to be judged by Western standards. It is here that ethnocentric universality comes into play. When these structures are defined as “underdeveloped” or “developing” and women are placed within them, an implicit image of the “average third world woman” is produced. This is the transformation of the (implicitly Western) “oppressed woman” into the “oppressed third world woman.” (Mohanty 1984/1991: 72)
As shown by Mohanty the “sexual difference’ – i.e. the basic assumption regarding universal female subordination – is exacerbated by what she calls the “third world difference”:
The “third world difference” includes a paternalistic attitude toward women in the third world. Since discussions of the various themes (kinship, education, religion etc.) are conducted in the context of the relative “underdevelopment” of the third world (which is nothing less than unjustifiably confusing development with the separate path taken by the West in its development as well as ignoring the directionality of the first world / third world power relationship), third world women as a group or category are automatically and necessarily defined as religious (read: “not progressive”), family-oriented (read “traditional”), legal minors (read “they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their-rights’), illiterate (read “ignorant”), domestic (read “backward”) and sometimes revolutionary (read “the-country-is-in-a-state-of-war; they-must-fight!”). This is how the “third world difference” is produced. (Mohanty 1984/1991: 72)
Western women, Mohanty says, succeed in staging them/ourselves as modern and developed, equal and free, exactly by constructing the mirror image of the third world woman as other: “Universal images of “the third world woman’ (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.) images constructed from adding the “third world difference’ to “sexual difference’ are predicated upon [...] assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated and having control over their own lives” (Mohanty 1984/1991: 74). Because the images of self and other are so closely interlinked, the patterns are hard to break by the self who constructed the other. Seen from the vantage point of the other, of course, the matter looks different.
What I have said so far is the following: Much mainstream modern thinking on gender shares at least three implicit assumptions: (a) man is posed as the subject and woman as other (phallocentricity), (b) development is conceived as an unilinear move from “tradition” towards “modernity” – the measure for achievement being the Western world (ethnocentricity), and (c) third world women are conceived as subordinated and oppressed. In order to illustrate ways in which these assumptions work, even in feminist writings, I have lifted forward aspects of the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir in her classic and recently re-launched work The Second Sex. My analysis of de Beauvoir’s text aimed to show how some of the implicit assumptions listed above work in her writing, to a certain extent against her conscious intentions. That man is the model and subject is abundantly clear, in explicit writing as well as between the lines. This further implies that the female body, as measured against a male norm, is a handicap. Aspects of contemporary feminist thinking have, however, bypassed de Beauvoir and the kind of modernist thinking which she represents. I quote two feminist thinkers, who particularly challenge the phallocentrism and the ethnocentrism of de Beauvoir and others: Judith Butler and Chandra Mohanty. According to them, “otherness” is never given, it is always constructed: Woman-as-other, “woman = the second sex,”, is not a fact of nature. But what is the point of knowing that this is the case, if otherness keeps being reconstructed even in feminists’ analysis of women’s conditions? If woman-as-other is embedded in the very concepts and notions of gender, making it impossible to see what else might be there?
In the remaining part of the paper, I shall introduce concepts and lines of thinking launched by African feminist thinkers that contradict the notion of woman-as-other. In the work of these feminist writers, there is a refusal to see women as “others”; their own societies do not give rise to such ideas. The feminists in question have the courage to produce theoretical ideas based on knowledge of their own African societies, even if such ideas may contradict standard assumptions of Western knowledge. Ifi Amadiume on this basis puts “the mother-focused matri-centric unit’ centre stage, while Oyèrónké Oyewùmi questions the relevance, in an African context, of the very notion of “woman’. This may sound strange, but I shall explain. Before doing so, however, I shall provide some observations on kinship terminology. The point of this is to show the difficulties in thinking beyond the habitual concepts of everyday language.
In Western family structure the most important of women’s positions in the family context are captured by the terms: Mother/daughter/sister/wife. Additional terms include aunt, cousin, niece, grandmother, and granddaughter. In Western languages, the commonly used kinship terms are normally gendered. Of the nine terms listed above, eight are gendered; only one (cousin) is not. In African languages, however, kinship terms are often gender neutral. Based on her study among the matrilineal Kaonde in Zambia, Kate Crehan lists eight kinship terms as being the most important. Of those only two are gender specific, the six are gender neutral, like cousin, or like the (less used) English terms parent, sibling, spouse. If you need to indicate the sex of a person, you do it by other means (Crehan 1997: 89 ff). Furthermore, the Kaonde terms have different significance and do not translate directly to Western kinship terminology; the relationships lifted forward for naming are different from those used in the West. Often in matrilineal societies there are no fathers, and no mothers, as pointed out by Christian Geffray in his work on the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique (Geffray 1990). The kinship term apaapa refers to the group of men who are in-married strangers to the lineage to which the speaker belongs. The term fits all in-married men in the domestic group, among them the speaker’s own “father.” But this also means that “the pronunciation of the word apaapa does not, in the minds of a Makhuwa speaker, evoke an image comparable to the one that emerges when we pronounce the word “father” [...] Actually our social figure of “a father” is not symbolized, not verbalized and not even thinkable as such in Makhuwa country ...” (Geffray 1990: 154). Similarly, in Kaonde, the person we would identify as biological mother is not distinguished with a kinship term of her own. She is called by the same term used for all of the speaker’s female matrikin in the first ascending generation (Crehan 1997: 90).
According to Kate Crehan, and also to Oyèrónké Oyewùmí, seniority (older than/younger than) in African contexts is often more important than sex/gender. In a Western context the first thing you want to know about a person is the sex (or gender) of the person. Generally it is given by the language – by the name, or by the titles Mr/Ms, and by the pronouns he/she when you talk about the person. There are few ways of referring to somebody without indicating in the very reference the sex/gender of the person. Compare the awkwardness of referring to a transsexual person – is s/he a she or a he? In Yorùbá, however, Oyewùmí’s native tongue, “most names and all pronouns are ungendered.... [Thus] it is possible to hold a long and detailed conversation about a person without indicating the gender of that person, unless the anatomy is central to the issue under discussion, as with conversations about sexual intercourse or pregnancy. There is, however, considerable anxiety about establishing seniority in any social interaction” (Oyewùmí 1997: 40, emphasis added).
An important difference between sex/gender and seniority is that sex/gender is absolute: you are or are not a man/woman (the marginal case of transsexuals being the only exception). Seniority, however, is relational: You are older than or younger than, depending on the context and the situation. “Seniority is relational and situational in that no one is permanently in a senior or junior position; it all depends on who is present in any given situation. Seniority, unlike gender, is only comprehensible as part of relationships. Thus it is neither rigidly fixated on the body nor dichotomized” (Oyewùmí 1997: 42).
Western feminism, Oyewùmí says, takes its point of departure in woman as wife and as daughter (2000: 1094). Simone de Beauvoir’s work is a good example of that: Woman is identified and described in relation to a man in position of authority: the husband, the father. In Africa, however, the most crucial position of a woman is her position as mother. “Mother is the preferred and cherished self-identity of many African women” (Oyewùmí 2000: 1096). The position of mother is in itself a position of authority. Motherhood, however, is largely neglected in Western feminist thought (and certainly not supported in de Beauvoir’s lines of thinking). In Western feminism as in Western society, to be a mother is to live in a perpetual dilemma between your own emotional priorities and the economic and work-related priorities of the society of which you are a part.
Even if I find Oyewùmí in some ways more radical than Ifi Amadiume in her critique of Western (feminist) thinking, Oyewùmí largely remains in the critical position, whereas Amadiume, as I see it, goes further in terms of suggesting alternative paradigms for analysis. Oyèrónké Oyewùmí and Ifi Amadiume are both Nigerian women, one of Yorùbá and the other of Igbo background. Both are presently living and working in the United States.
Oyèrónké Oyewùmí is trained in sociology. For thinking about African gender relations she draws upon her childhood and upbringing in the house of a Yorùbá chief: “In 1973, my father ascended the throne and became the Sòún (monarch) of Ogbómòsó, a major Òyó-Yorùbá polity of some historical significance. Since then and up to the present, ààfin Sóún (the palace) has been the place I call home. [...] I cannot overemphasize the contributions of the conversations I had with my parents, older and younger siblings, the many mothers and fathers in the palace, and the family in general in the course of the many years of this research” (Oyewùmí 1997: xvi). In her book: The Invention of Women. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997), she offers a series of very radical and very critical observations of Western feminist thought, one of them being her critique of “woman” as a social category.
In 1996 the Network for Women’s Studies in Nigeria organized a national workshop in order to discuss the applicability in Africa of basic concepts such as “woman,” “gender” and “feminism.” In her introductory speech, Amina Mama, at that point the coordinator of the network, said:
The experience of African women across the region indicates that we cannot just passively import terms and concepts that have been developed elsewhere, under different social and political conditions. [...] The task we face as African intellectuals is that of developing our own applications of given theories, and more radically, of taking our own realities as the starting point for articulating perspectives, or even entirely new theories that emanate organically from our particular conditions and concerns. (Mama 1997: 4-5)
Oyèrónké Oyewùmí did not participate in the workshop, but she took up the challenge. “I came to realize,” she writes in the preface to her book, “that the fundamental category “woman’ – which is foundational in Western gender discourses – simply did not exist in Yorùbáland prior to its sustained contact with the West. There was no such preexisting group characterized by shared interests, desires or social position. [...] Gender was simply not inherent in human organization” (Oyewùmí 1997: ix, xii). Thus in Yorùbá society, there was no such thing as “woman’ being the other. A male would not, just by virtue of his body-type, be considered superior to a female. “Yorùbá cultural logic did not use the human body as the basis for social ranking. [...] Yorùbá society was hierarchically organized, from slaves to rulers, but the ranking of individuals depended first and foremost on seniority, which was usually defined by relative age” (Oyewùmí 1997: xiii). “Social identity” Oyewùmí sums up, “was relational and was not essentialized. [...] Man and woman are essentialized. These essential gender identities in Western cultures attach to all social engagements, no matter how far from the issues of social reproductions such undertakings may be” (Oyewùmí 1997: xiii). The Western gender categories are pervasive, however. “Merely by analyzing a particular society with gender constructs, scholars create gender categories. To put this in another way: by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. Gender, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder” (1997: xv, emphasis added). It is along this line of reasoning that Oyewùmí talks of a “process of patriarchalizing Yorùbá history and culture” (1997: 29) through Western social science, the patriarchalizing gaze.
The patriarchalizing gaze invents women-as-other, and introduces what Oyewùmí calls “body-reasoning” (1997: 5): a biological interpretation of the social world, resulting in hierarchies based on bodies: male/female, white/black. Oyewùmí challenges the commonly shared belief that biological determinism is dead and gone in Western thought. Not at all, she says; on the contrary, “the cultural logic of Western social categories is based on an ideology of biological determinism; [...] biology provides the rationale for the organization of social life” (1997: ix). In the Western context, physical bodies are always also social bodies: A priori, ranking depends on gender. To make her point, Oyewùmí quotes Dorothy Smith: “A man’s body gives credibility to his utterance, whereas a woman’s body takes it away from hers” (1997: x). Biological determinism, Oyewùmí says, is a filter through which all knowledge about society is run (1997: 5). A mind/body hierarchy is embedded in Western thinking. Bodies are disavowed, but nevertheless they are always there, as social markers. According to Oyewùmí, Freud’s dictum still holds true: What he said about “anatomy is destiny’ was nothing exceptional. He was just being explicit (Oyewùmí 1997: 7, 8).
Because of this body-focused Western thinking (cf. the mechanisms of disavowal/projection as shown by Judith Butler) with bodies as social markers (e.g. male/female; white/black), the concept “woman” carries connotations which are irrelevant and distorting in an African context. To talk about “men” and “women” in a Western sense creates ideas which do not fit Yorùbá realities. Nevertheless “men” and “women” in the Western sense are created by the Western patriarchalizing gaze. An example: In Yòrúba oba, which means “ruler,” denotes a social position to be occupied by a man or by a woman. But in Western translation, oba has come to mean “king.” (Oyewùmí 1997: 30). Whenever Westeners see a throne, they expect a man to be sitting on it.
Ifi Amadiume is a social anthropologist. Her first book, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, based on fieldwork conducted in her own home town, was published in 1987. She initiated that study on the background of her anger and frustration over the ways in which gender issues in Africa were portrayed first by British social anthropologists and later by Western feminist scholars: “It was not enough to shout out in anger at conferences or to get into heated debate with friends. I decided it was best to go home and, with the help of Nnobi people themselves, write our own social history, especially from the women’s point of view” (Amadiume 1987: 9). In her second book from 1997, she develops further some of her leading themes.
One of her key points is similar to the one made by Oyewùmí on the “rulers” who may be men or women, and only when seen by Western eyes turn into “kings.” Similarly, in Igbo society, many social positions may be taken up by either men or women. For example, the Igbo term for husband, di, is not gendered; both a man and a woman can be husband (1997: 128): Daughters may step into positions of sons, and women may act as husbands for other wives. Thus, she says, there is “in African gender systems a flexibility which allows a neuter construct for men and women to share roles and status” (1997: 112).
In indigenous Nnobi society [...] the ultimate indication of wealth and power, the title system, was open to men and women, as was the means of becoming rich through control over the labour of others by way of polygamy, whether man-to-woman marriage or woman-to-woman marriage. The Nnobi flexible gender system made either possible. (1987: 42)
The point here is that power is not masculine per se, power may be male or female—unlike in the West, where women who successfully manage to wield power in the public sphere have to take on “an outward appearance of maleness such as deepened voices and tailored suits” (1997: 113). Thus in Nnobi context woman-as-other just does not occur. The place from which one views woman-as-other doesn’t exist.
Another key point is the importance accorded to motherhood. Here again the Western patriarchalizing gaze is a major complication. As Oyewùmí pointed out, males and females are observed, and the Western meaning of ‘woman’—i.e. woman-as-other—is assumed for women everywhere so is the Western meaning of ‘motherhood’ (which carries a lot of very specific connotations) projected onto females with offspring everywhere. What is at issue, however, is not mothering as a physical fact, but the social position and importance given to motherhood, the meaning of mothering. As put by Mohanty: “That women mother in a variety of societies is not as significant as the value attached to mothering in these societies. The distinction between the act of mothering and the status attached to it is a very important one—one that needs to be stated and analyzed contextually” (Mohanty 1991: 60, emphasis added).
The challenge thus is to find out what motherhood in Africa is about. This will reveal the differences between motherhood in Africa and in the West where motherhood has no high status, being naturalized and trivialized, as demonstrated so eloquently by Simone de Beauvoir. Ifi Amadiume points to African women’s power being based on “the logic of motherhood,” i.e. the notion that motherhood is empowering and not disempowering, as it tends to be in the West:
In my research I have found that the traditional power of African women had an economic and ideological basis, and derived from the sacred and almost divine importance accorded to motherhood. This has led me to argue that the issue of the structural status of motherhood is the main difference between the historical experiences of African women and those of European women. (Amadiume 1997: 146)
But she also realizes that “the very thought of women’s power being based on the logic of motherhood has proved offensive to many Western feminists. It is easy to see why this is so since in the European system, wifehood and motherhood represented a means of enslavement of women. In the African system of matriarchy it was women’s means of empowerment” (1997: 114). Amadiume plays with the idea of re-introducing the concept of matriarchy as a counterweight to the Western patriarchy, which tends to be taken for granted. I shall come back to this discussion below. Also, for Oyewùmí, the position of the mother is crucial: “In all African family arrangements, the most important ties within the family flow from the mother, whatever the norms of marriage residence. These ties link the mother to the child and connect the children of the same mother in bonds that are conceived as natural and unbreakable. [...] The idea that mothers are powerful is very much a defining characteristic of the institution and its place in society” (Oyewùmí 2000: 1097).
Trying to derive theoretical implications from her important insights regarding motherhood in Africa as compared to in the West, Ifi Amadiume speaks of “the motherhood paradigm.” The point is, by talking of the motherhood paradigm, to raise awareness regarding the often implicit patriarchal paradigm in social science: “The recognition of the motherhood paradigm means that we do not take patriarchy as given, or as a paradigm” (1997: 21). A consequence of this move is “a shift of focus from man at the centre and in control, to the primacy of the role of the mother/sister in the economic, social political and religious institutions” (Amadiume 1997: 152, emphasis added).
It is in this context that Amadiume (re-)introduces the term “matriarchy.” She talks about “a missing matriarchal structure in African studies” (1997: 19), meaning a lack of awareness of the centrality of motherhood, or (which amounts to the same) an implicit application of Western gender terms with Western connotations, such as a priori gender hierarchies defining women as “others.” When she takes up what she calls “the vexing concept of matriarchy” (1997: 71) – and the concept of matriarchy certainly has a long and complicated history in European social science—it is not, however, in order to apply it as an overall matrix to cover all aspects of society. She wants to use it “not as a totalitarian system – that is the total rule governing a society—but as a structural system in juxtaposition with another system in a social structure” (1997: 71, emphasis added). Amadiume has developed this model for analysis from her studies of Nnobi society: “The ideology of gender had its basis in the binary opposition between the mkpuke, the female mother-focused matricentric unit, and the obi, the male-focused ancestral house” (1997: 18). These two systems, the mkpuke and the obi, co-exist. If social science analysis only takes its point of departure in concepts deriving from the obi, important aspects of the ways this society functions will be lost. Theoretical awareness of this co-existence of mkpuke and obi points to the need for different and more specific concepts than the ones rooted in a patriarchal system. “The mkpuke as a female gendered, paradigmatical cultural construct demolished the generalized theory that man is culture and woman is nature in the nature/culture debate in anthropology” (Amadiume 1997: 19). This is an indirect reference to de Beauvoir: A central paper in this debate, Sherry Orther’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” (1974) draws heavily on The Second Sex, and is dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir.
The point of Amadiume’s suggested paradigm for gender studies is, as I read it, (a) to be critical of the usual Western gender concepts, which often carry an implicit male bias, and b) to craft concepts particularly fitted to deal with motherhood; not with abstract motherhood—here the risks of the nature/culture Western connotations hanging on is too great—but with the concrete sociological phenomenon of “the mother-focused, matric-centric unit.” Amadiume is trying to create a model for a kind of dialectical analysis, shifting the focus between the obi, the male-focused ancestral house (this aspect often having been the sole concern of the classical social anthropologists, cf. Amadiume 1997: 29 ff), on one hand, and on the other the mkpuke, the mother-focused matri-centric unit. The implication is that this kind of double-focus analysis would be applicable also elsewhere in Africa.
I have introduced Oyèrónké Oyewùmí and Ifi Amadiume as brave and determined feminist scholars who have had the courage to go against established power structures and current fashions in feminist thought. Nevertheless I find them too timid, in one particular aspect: They tend to limit the scope of their analysis to Africa, which in one way is fine—concrete, rooted studies with concepts which are sensitive to empirical particularities are always a good thing. In another way, however, this approach tends to consolidate a difference between Africa and the West—a dichotomization which I find unproductive and also unjustified. Both Amadiume and Oyewùmí make explicit distinctions between African and Western realities, talking about motherhood in the African context being such and such, and thus needing different concepts, as compared to analysis of Western realities, where motherhood and femininity are different. I agree that the realities are different (or especially that they were different – both researchers draw their conceptual inspiration from things as they were before the impacts of colonialism, Christianity, and continued contact with the West). To me the point about empirical differences between Africa and Europe is not, however, that concepts developed for Africa are useful in Africa only, but rather that the “African difference” is a source of inspiration for developing concepts which make it possible to think differently about gender in Western contexts as well.
Thus I see Oyewùmí’s and Amadiume’s contributions as important to feminist theory as such, for two interconnected reasons. First, they manage to think beyond woman-as-other as taken for granted, which is a major theoretical achievement. With woman-as-other being embedded in the very concept of “woman”—as is the case in most feminist thinking—imagining futures with woman not as the other becomes an impossible task. Second, in their analysis they produce images—of human relations, of motherhood—which open the mind for different ways of thinking about gender, thus “enabling other virtual futures to be conceived, other perspectives to be developed” (Grosz 2000: 1019). I find the re-thinking of motherhood particularly pertinent. The ways in which Western patriarchal thought has managed to naturalize and trivialize motherhood are absolutely appalling. And even worse is it that feminist thought has done very little about it. Motherhood remains an under-researched and under-conceptualized area in Western feminist scholarship. 2 In contemporary trend-setting feminist thought, as for instance in Judith Butler’s works, thinking about motherhood is absent. One consequence of such blank spots in feminist thinking—and of implicit phallocentric and/or ethnocentric assumptions still going strong—is that strategies for the future remain deeply flawed. In the lines of thinking underpinning global feminist documents such as the Beijing Platform for Action, and also informing current Gender-and-Development thinking, the vision of gender equality has not moved very far from Simone de Beauvoir’s visions of “wage work and contraception,” i.e. feminine futures on male terrain, with man as the model. Inspiration and conceptual imagination which may help to push feminist thinking beyond those limits are greatly needed. This is the important contribution of African feminist thought.
Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Zed Books.
Amadiume, Ifi. 1997. Reinventing Africa. Matriarchy, Religion and Culture, Zed Books.
Butler, Judith. 1990/1999. Gender Trouble, Routledge.
Crehan, Kate. 1997. The Fractured Community. Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia, University of California Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1949/1997. The Second Sex, Vintage Classics.
Geffray, Christian, 1990. Ni Père, ni mère. Critique de la parenté: le cas makhuwa, Éditions du Seuil.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2000. Histories of a Feminist Future, in Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2000, vol 25, no 4.
Larsen, Wenche. 2000. Frihet, likhet og ...? Det annet kjönn, take two. En samtale med Toril Moi, i: Kvinneforskning 2/2000.
Mama, Amina. 1997. Defining Terms and Concepts for Ourselves, in Charmaine Pereira (ed): Concepts and Methods for Gender and Women’s Studies in Nigeria. Report of the Network for Women’s Studies in Nigeria, no. 2, Tamaza Publishing Co. Zaria.
Mohanty, Chandra T. 1984/1997. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, in Chandra Mohanty et al. (eds): Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Indiana University Press.
Moi, Toril. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir. The making of an intellectual woman, Blackwell Publishers.
Oyewùmí, Oyérònké. 1997. The Invention of Women. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press.
Oyewùmí, Oyérònké. 2000. Family Bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemiologies, in Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2000, vol. 25, no. 4.
Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
Arnfred, Signe (2002). SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR IN AFRICA: "WOMAN = THE SECOND SEX?" ISSUES OF AFRICAN FEMINIST THOUGHT. Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: 2, 1.