"Women in Yorùbá Religions discusses the influence of Yoruba culture on women's religious lives and leadership in religions practiced by Yoruba people, covering themes like Yoruba women in Yoruba religion, Christianity, and Islam; women in African-derived religions in the diaspora; Yoruba religion and globalization; and LGBTQ adherents of Yoruba religion"--
Opening -- Sources and questions -- Yorubaland, 1820-1893 -- Colonial Yorubaland, 1893-1960 -- Family and marriage -- Labor, property, and agriculture -- Income-generating activities in the nineteenth century -- New approaches to familiar roles during the colonial period -- Western skills and service careers -- Religion, cultural forms, and associations -- Regents and chiefs, economic organizations, and politics -- Patriarchy, colonialism, and women's agency
"Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétou, Benin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices"--Provided by publisher.
This fascinating ethnographic study investigates gendered power in contemporary Nigeria in order to provide an understanding of The Ondo Women's War of 1985. Sanctioned by Ondo's female chiefs in the name of their female king, this tax protest escalated into rebellion when ordinary women threatened the use of their ultimate weapon -their own nakedness. Focusing on a specific Yoruba case history, this book challenges many western feminist assumptions about women's lack of status in Africa.
A randomly selected clinic population of 400 pregnant women in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, were interviewed for complaints of psychological disorders during the last trimester of pregnancy and the post-partum period. The study shows a considerable degree of psychological disturbances during pregnancy which later decreased significantly dur ing the post-partum. While the complaints of worrying, guilt-feeling, nausea and vomiting and "heat in-the-head", were significantly more common in younger women, insomnia and anorexia were more common in older women. The incidence of psychological complaints among the women decreased with increasing parity. There was no significant difference in the incidence between women with monogamous and polygamous marriages.
This paper explores a narrative path towards foregrounding what it calls a gender-relative morality as a core dimension of female subordination. It takes a feministapproach to ethics, which stresses specifically the political enterprise of eradicating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. The theoretical implications of Feminist narrative ethics is then applied to the philosophical imports of Yorùbá proverbs about women as a way to tease out how female subordination is grounded in Yorùbá ontology and ethics. Spe[1]cifically, the essay interrogates the ethical and aesthetical trajectory that leads from ìwà l'ẹwà (character is beauty), a Yoruba moral dictum, to ìwà l'ẹwà obìnrin ([good moral] character is a woman's beauty). Within this transition, there is the possibility that the woman is excluded from the category of those properly referred to as ọmọlúwàbí.
In: Africa development: a quarterly journal of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa = Afrique et développement, Band 34, Heft 2, S. 47-57