Ifi Amadiume
Published by Zed Books Ltd in 1987
I chose the book Male daughters, female husbands by Ifi Amadiume. The reason I chose this book is because I have always been curious about the role of women in non western countries and why they were viewed as being subservient to men by their own as well as the western world. Ifi Amadiume, a Nigerian sociologist with a London University doctorate, conducted research in her own family area to study gender and sex in an African Society. Challenging the received orthodoxies of social anthropology, Ifi Amadiume argues that in precolonial society, sex and gender did not necessarily coincide. In the book she examines the structures that enable women to achieve power and shows that roles are neither rigidly masculine nor feminine. This study that was conducted relates to social anthropology. The study was conducted in Nnobi, a town in the only Igbo area which has not been studied in detail by any scientist or anthropologist. Fieldwork was conducted in Nnobi between 1980 and 1982 on the Igbo people. As a result of the 1976 local government reform which divided Nigeria into 19 states and 299 local governments, Nnobi became one of the towns in the Idemili local government. Most of the Igbo people were also separated between states. The 1963 population census put the total number of Igbo people at 7,209,716. The study is divided into three periods: pre-colonial, when the traditional systems operated: colonial, when the British ruled Nigeria: and post-colonial, when Nigeria became an independent nation. There were further divisions of these periods such as Gender and the economy, the ideology of gender, and the general beliefs about men and women in which we will look into further in the following paragraphs.
First we will take a look at gender and the economy. This was part of the pre-colonial period. It is within this period that ideologies behind the Igbo and Nnobi , their sexual