On Women And The Development of Patriarchy.

Our time is poised with a myriad of reasons as the most engrossing time to talk about gender equality and the feminist philosophy in relations to the female social ontology and male biases installed in our social norms through more than two thousand years of evolution. The cultural and social result of the treatment of women throughout the ages has been increased female objectification and the further advancement of a subjugated social class from the great histories, real and fictional, of most of our male-dominated civilizations. In spite of this, the last thirty years have witnessed a great shift in society with the rise of feminist movements in the early 1920s and 40s asserting female agency amid the cultural and social inequalities perpetrated against women and girls.

What this has done is to offer us an opportunity for change and the reexamination of the moral codes of our society. We now witness, for the first time in history, a world where men and women compete for jobs, and the latter could possibly be chosen. “Affirmative Action” and private sector’s supposed commitment to gender equality and the empowerment of women, as a make-up for their historical mental and physical repression and exclusion, have played a key role. In Western societies, more women graduate from college than men- an incredible shift from the masculine world sixty years ago. The traditional mode of most African societies has witnessed little change with the rising wave of women in leadership, educational institutions and a seat at the table in relations to political and policy discussions. The feminist specter is at last hunting the continent with policies that favour women for targeted positions in parliaments and social institutions like communism hunted Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries through the publication of the Communist Manifesto and the rise of workers’ movements across Europe.

One hallmark of this, though not sufficient as most part of the country and continent is still rife with misogyny, is reflected in a 2016 policy of the Liberian National Legislature that created three extra seats for women in parliament to advance their cause. While the passage of the policy has not taken effect, and its mechanics remain unclear, it’s for the most part, a huge step toward women empowerment and political participation — in addition to producing the continent’s first elected female President. Additionally, in spite of Rwanda’s atrocious genocide that wrecked the lives of a million people in 1994, it has had women at the helm of its recovery process with the highest percentage of women in government (53%) in the world and countries like Iceland, Finland and Norway have made tremendous strides in annihilating the gap between men and women through political and social empowerment.

However, for over a century, the social institutions at every instant, have been hell-bent on keeping women at the bowels of society. It’s clear that without the intricacies of the female genitalia, the male species would have driven women to extinction in the same way Homo Sapiens wiped Neanderthals from earth’s surface. Women’s vaginas remain their greatest crime against men from the dawn of humanity; thus their exploitation as sex objects, made only for procreation or perversion, from one civilization to another throughout our human existence speaks volume. The social ontology of women in today’s society is imbued in a historical conflict that is a product of psychological and social construction. Their reproductive system has been exploited to create social characteristics that are suitable for male oppression and dominance. The root of this can be traced to medieval periods during the clash of kingdoms and civilizations. Marcuse postulates that this is a history of thousands of years, “during which the defence of the established society and its hierarchy depended on physical strength and thereby reduced the role of the female who was periodically disabled by the bearing and then caring of children”. Male domination, according to Marcuse, “once established on these grounds, spread from the originally military sphere to the other social and political institutions. The woman came to be regarded as inferior, as weaker, mainly support for, adjunct to man, as a sexual object, as a tool of reproduction”. In the process, women lost out on not only their intellectual and sexual development but their economic and social development.

In African societies, women stayed home in periods of war because of childbearing to look after the homes while the men were gone. An existential threat to the men became apparent — how were they to ensure the faithfulness of their women in their absence? This resulted in the engineering of a system to block their sexual arousal, the removal of the clitoris — (a small, sensitive and erectile part of the female genitals), was designed and put in place as a long-term remedy. This hampered the female sexual desires and took away most part of her sexual sensations. As experiences have shown, women with their clitoris removed barely have the sexual instincts compared to those untouched and they experience a painful sexual life. The birth of this practice reduced women to sex objects for men and ripped away their sexual inclinations while making them more prone to diseases and painful menstruation. This barbarity, which happens even in today’s civilization, stands as one of the greatest crimes by men against women and has been normalized and accepted as a practice in most cultures. It contributed to the social conditioning of the feminine characteristics and forms part of the basis on which our definition of the woman today is predicated.

From a materialist lens of history, transcending the natural constraints of human existence for survival depended on physical force in medieval periods. The most powerful managed to amass and concentrate wealth within their social level at the expense of other sections of society, especially women who were considered weak. Little girls in China suffered the consequence the most as they were left to die while women were banned from production. Pre-Islamic Arabia was a bastion of female infantile (the deliberate killing of baby girls) as they were not considered suitable for carrying the legacy of the family.

In traditional African societies, there exists a strong respect for ancestry but those ancestors are seen through a masculine lens. An African professing ancestry is probably referring to his great-grandfather or some old man who died hundreds of years ago. With the control of the family in the hands of men, becoming an immortal was based on the family left behind, and the African concept of immortality and ancestry is unconsciously driven toward fatherhood. Africa’s duo fertility in medieval periods was a hallmark of the continent’s values that most scholars celebrate, especially the Tiffs of Nigeria that portrays the woman as “a symbol of two fertilities”, where she’s hailed as bearing children and producing the land as taught by Mazrui. In Mazrui words, “the womb and the soil together produce the next generation of society”. In its own defence, this system was considered to be hugely respectful of women and their dignity. Even Mazrui frowns on the abolition of Africa’s duo fertility by colonialism which extracted women from the soil and transported them to mere clerks and office workers. In its limitations, it positioned women to a level that barred them from pursuing positions of leadership and major decision making, except for working on the soil and procreating. It was based on a massive concentration of power in the hands of men that led to the cultural and social delineation of women from rising to the hierarchy of most African societies. Sexual inequality ensued as a result of these historical processes and men in most civilizations felt entitled to the female body.

This too is in no innocence of religion as most of what is wrong with our cultures today comes from a religious concept that made the first woman the perpetrator of the first sin. In Mazrui’s triple heritage, it’s apparent that “one impediment to sexual inequality is religion. Traditional Africa, for instance, abounds with images of women as weak, tempting and irrelevant. Islam portrays the first woman, Eve, negatively in its own version of the development of the human race. And Some versions of Christianity trace the original sin to Eve and the serpent who was sentenced by God to undergo the pain of childbirth”. What Mazrui reveals is the fact that it’s clear, of course, that we’ve learned to respect the woman as a sister, mother, and daughter, but it’s not clear if we respect her as a human being.

These, by design not accident, are byproducts of the psychological upbringing of children from birth to adulthood. The life instincts created for baby girls while growing up contributes to this systematic programming and the social exclusion of women. Before attainment of consciousness, as we have learned from the French existentialist philosopher and feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir, the difference in the handling of children draws a dichotomy in their social difference. The problem is not that the natural difference between the sexes is bad, but the instincts that are curated as social characteristics of women make her an object, instead of being a subject with her own autonomy from a feminist perspective.

On this ground, any step toward women empowerment and the successes of feminist movements would remain flawed without a dismantling of the popular conceptions of femininity and true assertion of the female autonomy as opposed to the life instincts created by men through psychological and social evolution from childhood. Fostering radical reconstruction of society must start with deconstructing the current social orders and the framework in which they are manifested for they are exploitative in the context of women liberation. In essence, what this seeks to do is to undermine the historical developments that socially conditioned women with new social norms of equality. Even as of now, the idea of who a woman remains a contested historical and philosophical debate to which there has been no convergence. Most feminist philosophers, including Simone de Beauvoir, has argued, that the biological sex of a woman as discrete from men remain an established phenomenon, but its social characteristics in the context of gender are what has been contested as a by-product of history and the fragmentation of society built on the subjugation of the woman. To unpack this is to first make clear that the sexes as male and female are not under question as a social construct, but rather the concept of gender and its roles, which derives from culture and history; and there can be no better legitimacy of this than Simone’s epitaph “one is not born, but becomes a woman”. Though this issue is too sensitive and a hard to explore topic, the main point of contention here is the social differences established as a result of psychology and history.

The successes of feminist movements and empowerment programs for women in this decade or next must first start with this grassroots education of addressing these misconceptions. Women cannot rely on men for this social awakening; they must lead their own struggle, establish their own social and radical institutions and all this can start with a reorientation and education program for women. The myths of womanhood and its shackles must be debunked for this would mean the declaration of female independence, a firm step in the direction of equality, and the disbandment of the weakness that has been attached to her throughout history.

Originally published as a two-part series in the sleeplessinmonrovia blog.