"To Be an African Working Woman": Levels of Feminist Consciousness in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes

Oko flung the bedcloth away from him, sat up, pulled her down, and moved on her. Esi started to protest. But he went on doing what he had determined to do all morning. He squeezed her breast repeatedly, thrust his tongue into her mouth, forced her unwilling legs apart, entered her, plunging in and out of her, thrashing to the left, to the right, pounding and just pounding away. Then it was all over. Breathing like a marathon runner at the end of a particularly gruelling race, he got off her, and fell heavily back on his side of the bed.

—Changes 9

With this disturbing scene of marital rape occurring in the opening pages of her 1991 novel Changes, Ama Ata Aidoo introduces her reader to some of the major issues she takes on in the work. Yet in her prefatory "confession," Aidoo apologizes for having written Changes, which she claims is "about lovers in Accra." "Because surely," she explains, "in our environment there are more important things to write about?" And while the subtitle of Changes is simply "A Love Story," such a description fails to adequately suggest the riches of this recent work by the Ghanaian writer. Other themes Aidoo discusses include working women's double shift, polygyny, the visibility of single women in urban environments, education, and the lack of significant change in contemporary women's circumstances. An African feminist, Aidoo grounds her discussion of these issues fully in the African context. Thus, whereas Western feminism tends to focus on working women chafing under the glass ceiling, Aidoo presents us with the more "concrete" reality of African women's limiting factors, an unadorned portrayal of the complex web of frustration making up the everyday lives of contemporary West African women. Among these exacerbating factors are the traditional social expectations of women's roles as wives and mothers first, with an outside job only if necessary to support the family. Moreover, the traditional division of labor within the household allocates the bulk of the chores to women, thus placing extreme time constraints on working women. Wife-beating, euphemistically referred to as "correction," is still seen as a husband's right, to be exercised should a woman fail to perform to expectations. ² Most women work because a single income is insufficient to support their household. While their economic contribution to the household is often vital to the well-being of their families, few women are formally employed, and most work in service industries. Seeking a career— rather than merely a second income—is thus viewed as unnatural, especially when that career is not itself in a primarily "feminine" field.

In her essay "To Be a Woman," Aidoo lists a few of the offensive experiences she has encountered as a professional academic in Ghana. In an argument on a national issue, for example, she was told by fellow Ghanaian professors that she was not fit to speak about public matters, but should concentrate instead on her writing. The "ordinary intellectual challenge" she presented was met with appalling "vulgarity and venom," she recalls (262n). As a writer, she was in turn belittled and misunderstood when her department chair told her he thought her book Our Sister Killjoy was good enough "for all these women's studies programs" (262) rather than as a national statement on postcolonial Ghana. "I am convinced that if Killjoy or anything like it had been written by a man . . . no one would have been able to sleep a wink these last couple of years, for all the noise that would have been made about it," she remarks bitterly (262). And while she acknowledges that her position as female university teacher and writer is extremely uncommon, she nevertheless calls on women in all walks of life to take collective action to improve their circumstances: "Because you are...