A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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everything, and she is therefore called in our law a feme covert…. Her husband [is called] her baron, or lord.” A married woman had no legal rights to her property, her earnings, her freedom of movement, her conscience, her body, or her children; all resided in her husband. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries women and their male allies in feminist, revolutionary, and anti‐colonial movements challenged these holdovers of aristocratic patriarchal society, insisting that rather than protecting women in the domestic sphere of home and family, these legal disabilities exposed them to the brutalities of the world at large.
Western Models in a Colonial Setting
Europeans took the Western binary model of gender with them when they colonized lands in Asia and Africa, and found themselves operating in settings governed by entirely different norms for men and women. In their ignorance of gender rules pertaining to other cultures, they made assumptions about how various non‐Western societies functioned, leading them, frequently, into difficult situations. In one remarkable instance, European beliefs and misunderstandings of gender arrangements in non‐Western lands provoked profound violence. In November and December 1929, a dramatic series of demonstrations, protests, risings, and riots involving tens of thousands of Igbo‐ and Ibibio‐speaking women took place throughout southeastern Nigeria. In the course of the “Women’s War,” or Ogu Umunwaanyi, as the Igbo people called it, over fifty Igbo and Ibibio women were killed by British troops; an unknown number were wounded and otherwise traumatized.
On November 24, 1929, rumors that British colonial officials planned to tax Igbo women reached the village of Oloko in southeastern Nigeria. Upon hearing the news, a large crowd of women surrounded the compound of the village chief, Okugu. There they “sat on” him, a locally recognized practice undertaken when men committed offenses against women. When “sitting on a man,” women danced and sang until the object of their grievance acknowledged his offense and promised to make restitution. In this particular instance, the chief not only refused to admit to any wrongdoing, he set male members of his compound on the women, causing injury to eight of them. In response to Okugu’s transgressions and owing to the persistent rumors of taxation of women circulating in other towns and villages, enormous crowds of women – amounting to tens of thousands – geared up for political resistance just as they would for any serious ritual activity. They chalked their faces, removed their clothing, and covered their heads and torsos with palm leaves. Carrying staffs, they attacked native courts, looted banks, and stormed a number of European warehouses in a variety of towns and villages in southeastern Nigeria. They chose their targets purposefully, as Nwamuo, a member of the group “sitting on” Okugu, recounted. “They said that they wanted to destroy property generally so that all Whitemen might go home, because if they went home there would be no question of tax being paid,” she told the commissioners investigating the events of December 1929 (Bastian, Matera, and Kent, 2012: 153). Troops were called in and on December 16, the soldiers opened fire on the women with rifles and a Lewis gun, killing eighteen. The next day, a huge crowd of women met at Opobo, frightening the British officials there. The lieutenant in charge of the troops gave an order to fire. The soldiers shot and killed thirty‐two women; an additional eight women were pushed by the retreating crowd into the river below and drowned; thirty‐one women lay wounded by gunfire.
The Ogu broke out in large part because Igbo women perceived that their place and time‐honored functions and activities within their communities had come under attack by British colonialism. Pre‐ and early colonial Igbo‐speaking peoples possessed a highly developed religious cosmology. A first and important Igbo cosmological concept – one that remained elusive for the British in their interaction with Igbo‐speakers – concerned the continuity and contiguity of all parts of the cosmos. The “great spirit” Chukwu, the living, and the dead somehow intermingled and existed in the same conceptual space, even while they all had special spheres that they inhabited. Although Igbo‐speakers regarded Chukwu and Ala – the land – as being prior and therefore senior to humanity, humanity partook of both spiritual forces. Every human being contained a part of Chukwu, while also being given a physical body by his or her parents. The ancestors, both paternal and maternal, held a stake in the child through the Igbo concept of reincarnation. Any ancestor might manifest him or herself in any child. Men could therefore be reincarnated as females, women as males. The key to a successful life involved taking on the responsibilities of one’s current gender status in a mature and committed manner.
Being successful, in gendered as well as other social terms, entailed being “useful.” (Bastian et al., 2012) Although the Igbo recognized the individual and her agency as being important, that individual person was most socially important insofar as her strivings for attainment benefited some larger group. Whether the group constituted the individual’s kin group or his or her village, Igbo beliefs recognized that every person’s achievement had the potential to benefit everyone else. This ethic of mutual benefit applied also to gender relations across southeastern Nigeria, but particularly among Igbo‐speakers. Although wives were said to be “owned” by their husbands, and their children belonged to the man’s patriline, women tended to operate in a fairly independent manner. Every precolonial Igbo wife, for example, was supposed to have her own house within the husband’s compound and was responsible mainly to herself for her comings and goings outside the compound walls. In addition to sexual service, wives in the pre‐ and early colonial period owed their husbands meals – which every wife cooked and presented for the husband to taste, he deciding which wife’s meal he would actually consume. Men were obligated to provide their wives with yams to cook and clothes to wear. Beyond these basics, women had to fend for themselves – and usually did so quite capably.
Precolonial Igbo worldviews involved, then, a series of systems of mutual interdependence. Precolonial Igbo women expected to find this mutual interdependence in virtually every realm of life: in the political arena in their ultimate control over anyone they chose to put into office, for example, and in their domestic affairs, where the mundane practice of activities like cooking carried significant symbolic valence. Women had long participated in the governance of their villages prior to the arrival of Europeans; they had commanded a dominant and respected role in the marketplace; they contributed to the prosperity and very life of their families and kin through the processing of yams and the bearing of children. Because Westerners have difficulty accepting what appear to be contradictions in the lives of southeastern Nigerian women, the filter of Western gender obscures our appreciation that they could be completely at home in their personae as women traders and the guardians of the good of the land as well as in their personae as daughters, wives, and mothers. Not thinking of themselves as oppressed or kept in the domestic sphere – like their female counterparts in Western societies even in quite recent history – these women could be secure enough in their own sense of importance and worth to take an active part in social transformation and to try to effect change. To say that is not to argue that African women enjoyed “liberation” before Western women ever dreamed of such a state. Rather, early colonial Igbo and other southeastern women’s lives were more complex and interesting than Western notions of gender allow (Bastian et al., 2012).
When every individual contributed, the whole benefited. Problems occurred when any one element of a partnership tried to benefit more than the other parts. In such cases, the balance had to be restored, as the withdrawal of any party from these systems of interdependence endangered all other parties and all other systems. Cosmological systems of mutual interdependence and the relations between those systems had to be maintained. Without the interplay of worlds, the entire Igbo cosmos might collapse and all human beings would die. Igbo women believed it incumbent upon themselves to take whatever action might be necessary to ensure such an eventuality would not occur (Bastian et al., 2012).
The colonization of Nigeria by the British disrupted the social order of Igbo and other southeastern Nigerian peoples, especially as it pertained to gender. Colonial officials administered their regions according to the ideas and practices they had grown up with at home, in which women were expected to occupy a realm of life entirely separate from that of men. Women, in their experience, did not participate in governance or engage in market activities; they occupied a private sphere while men operated in public affairs. The colonial encounter thus produced