Male Daughters, Female Husbands at Thirty

Rereading Ifi Amadiume's brilliant Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society is a bit like looking at a thirty-year-old photo. So much is recognizable and appealing, but it's obvious that things were different then. I first encountered the book as a graduate student within a few years of its 1987 publication, and as I began teaching African history sometime later it made regular appearances on my syllabi. Fresh and bold, Male Daughters, Female Husbands offered revelations about gender and African women's history to both Africanist scholars and Western feminists. These days, as some of those insights have become almost commonplace, it is worth celebrating their emergence and noting their lasting influence. At the same time, it's also hard not to see Male Daughters, Female Husbands as a product of its era, a time when feminist gender analysis burst forth with all its promise and, from today's vantage point, limitations.

Grounded in the history and contemporary positions of women in Amadiume's hometown of Nnobi in southeastern Nigeria, Male Daughters, Female Husbands appealed to me most for its insistent distinction between sex and gender. Though precolonial Nnobi society was starkly divided by sex, its gender system was more flexible, allowing wealthy women to acquire wives and therefore become "husbands" and some daughters to be conceptualized as male in order to inherit the position of household head from their fathers. "The fact that biological sex did not always correspond to ideological gender meant that women could play roles usually monopolized by men, or be classified as 'males' in terms of power and authority over others," Amadiume wrote. "As such roles were not rigidly masculinized or feminized, no stigma was attached to breaking gender rules."¹ This gender flexibility was reflected in the Igbo language, which makes few gender distinctions, even in words for "husband" and "wife."²

All of this gave me ammunition for discussions with my historian colleagues about why non-Africanists should be interested in African history. Male Daughters, Female Husbands was published just after Joan Wallach Scott's article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," but a year before her book Gender and the Politics of History splashed onto the Euro-American historical scene.³ Conventional as it may seem now, gender was then a radical new tool for analyzing societies and history. Scott's definition of the term was meant to set the agenda for a new way of understanding history: "gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power."⁴ Writing for audiences in Nigeria and the United Kingdom, Amadiume did not engage with the academic conversations Scott was then pushing in the United States. Yet they shared similar concerns and insights: that gender was distinct from biological sex; that it is constituted in large measure through language; and that gender norms, discourses, and practices are historical and contingent.

Three years after Male Daughters, Female Husbands appeared, the American philosopher Judith Butler published Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.⁵ Butler's book took the distinction between sex and gender as its premise, arguing further that gender identities were created, perpetuated, and sometimes subverted through performance—that is, through words and actions in their social context. "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender," Butler wrote. "That identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results."⁶ She also shared Scott's and Amadiume's presumption that language reflected and reinforced views about gender. Butler went further, though, arguing that because experience and perception are always understood through language, there is no objective sex separate from gender—or there is no way to know if there is, which is essentially the same thing. Moreover, there is no necessary reason that society recognizes only two genders. Butler's book celebrated drag queens and other cross dressers because they exposed the performative nature of gender and subverted any notion that male and female were the only two possible gender identities. "In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency."⁷

Amadiume did not go that far, and she certainly did not equate male daughters or female husbands with drag queens (or kings). In her depiction, precolonial Nnobi had two and only two genders, and though they could be flexibly related to biological sex, the essential categorical quartet—male and female sex, male and female gender—was never in question. Reading her book now, though, it's hard to avoid thinking not only of Judith Butler, but of the scholars of masculinity who followed in the early 1990s and destabilized the notion that there was only one form of male (and implicitly, female) gender. The sociologist R. W. Connell differentiated between "hegemonic" masculinities—those that best fulfilled a society's normative ideas of male behavior and who therefore reaped the largest benefits from patriarchal systems—and more marginalized and subordinate male identities.⁸ Amadiume argued that a wealthy, titled, mature woman who had acquired her own wife or wives occupied a different gender than a young wife herself, functioning as a husband in a role defined as male. In Connell's terms, such a female husband represented hegemonic masculinity, despite her physical womanhood, because she partook of Nnobi's "patriarchal dividend." But was that female husband also considered different in some ways than husbands who were identified as male in all respects? Nwando Achebe's work on a female warrant chief, for instance, shows how tenuous the hold on sociological masculinity was even for a very powerful Igbo woman.⁹ "Masculinity and femininity mean different things according to whether they are lived out in and experienced by male or female bodies," Elizabeth Grosz wrote not long after Male Daughters, Female Husbands was published. "What is mapped onto the body is not unaffected by the body onto which it is projected."¹⁰ Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity later charted a range of masculine types enacted by female bodies over some 200 years in Europe and the United States, showing hybrid and minority genders that in some, but not, all ways resembled dominant masculinities.¹¹

The implicit assumption in Male Daughters, Female Husbands is that power in Nnobi society was gendered as male, so that when a woman exercised power in relation to others, she was considered male in a binary system in which the only choices were male or female. This both affirms and denies the relational nature of power, considering women as male when they had power over wives, lineage subordinates, or other less powerful women but leaving implicit the possibility that such women might simultaneously be subordinate to others who possessed more wealth or authority. In other words, Amadiume did not much consider intersectionality, a term not yet in academic use when Male Daughters, Female Husbands was written. Since then, African American feminists like Patricia Hill Collins have made the forceful case that multiple social and cultural hierarchies do not operate in isolation but instead intersect one another, producing distinct patterns of power, oppression, and experience.¹² People experience and act in the world through more than one characteristic—their sex, age, family status, wealth, etc.—simultaneously, and thus there is not one binary relationship of power. Interestingly, although Amadiume noted that at times "female solidarity was neutralized, to some extent, through the division of women on the basis of gender"¹³—thatis, when some women functioned as husbands or sons—she did not analyze deeply the other cleavages that differentiated women or intersected with gender, including slavery. Just as there can be multiple masculinities in society, surely there can also be multiple, and differently powerful, femininities.

I suspect today's readers would also wonder about Amadiume's suggestion that woman-to-woman marriage was asexual. She may well have been too polite, or her informants too discrete, for questions about sex and desire to have come up during her research. But if gender identities in precolonial Nnobi were flexible, why should we necessarily assume that sexuality was not similarly flexible? Fundamentally, what a female husband had in relation to her wife was power. Just as men in and outside of Africa have asserted power over their wives and other women through sexual acts, it is certainly possible that female husbands did the same. Research by Rudi Gaudio, Marc Epprecht, and others indicates that same-sex sexuality is not and has not been foreign to Africa, as some might claim.¹⁴ Why was the link between "female husbands" and their "wives" conceptualized as marriage rather than, say, slavery—especially given that, Amadiume tells us, the Igbo words used for creating the relationship literally meant "buying a slave?"¹⁵ Is it because the relationship entailed the kind of sexual and perhaps emotional interactions that were ideally part of marriage rather than some other type of service and subordination? Male Daughters, Female Husbands mentions an incident in which the widow of a woman-to-woman marriage got drunk and berated the women in her deceased female husband's lineage for not performing their sexual duties to her as a wife.¹⁶ Presented as an anomaly, could this instead be a revelation?

In fact, Amadiume tells readers little about the relationships and dynamics within woman-to-woman marriage. We know that they came about through the female husband's economic power, and that they entailed service and often child-bearing on the part of the wife. Regardless of the biological father of any children produced, they belonged to the female husband as part of her lineage. Concerned as she was to show the structural sources of women's power, Amadiume did not speculate about how the parties felt about their relationships. But gender inheres not only in language and in practice, but also in subjectivity.¹⁷ It seems like a missed opportunity not to have probed more deeply into how male daughters, female husbands, and others understood their own gendered positions.

It is worth remembering, though, that Male Daughters, Female Husbands was written only partially as a theoretical intervention about gender. Also a deeply researched work of women's history, it challenged some widespread assumptions of Western women's historians, namely the long-term continuity of patriarchy and the oppression of women, despite changes and variations in women's status over time and space.¹⁸ Amadiume had no patience for anthropological treatments of African women that depicted them as downtrodden subordinates to men throughout history. Nor could she tolerate Western feminists who generalized about all women on the basis of European and white American experiences. In this respect, she led an emerging chorus in the late 1980s, pushing practitioners of women's history to widen their gaze.¹⁹ Precolonial Nnobi was certainly no feminist utopia, but Amadiume's reconstruction renders it as a place where women could acquire wealth, power, and authority. Nnobi's goddess-centered religion included the ekwe title, bestowed on women with significant economic and leadership abilities. Daughters also wielded power in their fathers' households, where they were seen as men in relation to their male relatives' wives and therefore had ritual and political superiority over them. Thus, women possessed inherited power in their own patrilineages as daughters, while also having access to achieved power through women's associations and titles. All women were represented in a women's council, which, together with the influence of female title holders and a flexible gender ideology, checked and partially balanced male power within patrilineages and in the larger society.

Then came colonialism and missionary Christianity. Whereas the first part of Male Daughters, Female Husbands reconstructed the dual-sex/flexible gender system of precolonial Nnobi, the second section argued that these were significantly transformed when Europeans brought their own gender ideologies to Africa. Under the onslaught of British colonialism, a male deity and male priests replaced the goddess-centered religion, boys but not girls benefitted from Western education, and practices such as woman-to-woman marriage and widow inheritance (which Amadiume saw as protective of women) were banned. The newly instituted warrant chief system marginalized women from local government. Amadiume concluded that "women in Nnobi and in Igboland in general were neither more comfortable nor more advantaged from an economic point of view under colonialism. . . . Most important of all, pro-female institutions were being eroded by both the church and the colonial administration."²⁰ The well-known and massive eastern Nigerian women's protests of 1929, which succeeded in restructuring local government, as well as riots in the 1950s against women's loss of economic power through the introduction of palm-oil mills, reveal both the persistence of women's organizations and leadership and the devastating effects on women of colonial policies.

A generation of historians since the 1980s have generally concurred that colonialism had a negative impact on African women, undermining their political authority, excluding them from economic and educational opportunities, and eroding their rights.²¹ Some have been less willing than Amadiume, however, to downplay African male elites' complicity in this process. Elizabeth Schmidt described Zimbabwean women under colonialism as "beholden to two patriarchies," one African and one colonial. Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian showed how Asante chiefs used their power in colonial courts to restrict women's economic independence.²² Other scholars have noted that colonial visions were never the same as on-the-ground realities. Emily Osborn showed that French colonial efforts to starkly differentiate households from politics in West Africa, based on European gender assumptions, were only partially successful. Women in Kankan, Guinea, where Osborn focused her research, continued to participate actively in market trading, and though men dominated the colonial bureaucracy, they did not separate their households from their official roles. My own study of workers on the Nigerian Railway likewise revealed that colonial gender ideologies underpinned colonial labor policies, but these transferred to African households unevenly and with the active mediation of male workers and their female relatives.²³ Moreover, women dealt with their changing circumstances in creative ways, some seeking new opportunities (often paying a social price for it) and others—like the Igbo women who protested—defending their old prerogatives. In the process, they too reconfigured gender in Africa, as the title of a volume edited by Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy put it.²⁴

The third and final section of Male Daughters, Female Husbands considers Nnobi women and gender relations in the postindependence period. Under institutions inherited from colonialism, Amadiume tells us, Nnobi women became more constrained, less mobile, and generally poorer than before, whereas men became richer and more powerful in relation to women. Though women in the 1970s and 1980s continued to work hard to feed their families, they were unable to build wealth or take titles, and the church-based groups to which they belonged preached self-denial and charity rather than accumulation and ambition. While in the past women's maternal and domestic roles were highly valued, now they were constraining and unrewarded, a situation depicted in Buchi Emecheta's novel about an Igbo woman, The Joys of Motherhood.²⁵

But one of the most appealing aspects of the book, at least on rereading it in 2016, is that it does not stop with a description of what went wrong for Nnobi women. Instead, Male Daughters, Female Husbands poses twenty-two questions that Amadiume thought should be addressed by future research on African women, followed by a series of practical recommendations to help rectify Nnobi women's political and economic marginalization. This is engaged scholarship in a double sense: first, in answering biased or misinformed academic understandings of African women through a serious historical study; and second, by using that study to try to improve the society on which it is based. In a 1989 review of Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Jane Parpart wrote that "Amadiume has set the agenda for much of future feminist research in Africa. She should be congratulated for her insights and her courage, for she has raised issues which must be addressed by both local and foreign scholars concerned to understand the history and future of African women."²⁶ Its attention to both past and future makes Male Daughters, Female Husbands such a model for engaged historical research.

And this is what prompts me to think that ultimately Amadiume would care little about how her first book did or did not anticipate, amplify, or complicate the insights in now-classic works of Western gender theory by her contemporaries Joan Scott and Judith Butler. The preface to Male Daughters, Female Husbands makes clear her frustration with Western academics and feminists for their "imposition of concepts, proposals for political solutions, and terms of relationship."²⁷ This is a book written as much for Nnobi women as academic readers, and although it certainly suggests theoretical insights with broad applications, these are never highlighted to the exclusion of urgent matters on the ground. "As well as looking into the socio-cultural systems which guaranteed women power, and making recommendations to their governments," Amadiume wrote, "African and other Third World women still have a role to play in exposing the contradictions in their societies, recording their own social history with a view to challenging, where necessary, discrimination against women, and positively aiming for more power for women and more egalitarian societies for everyone."²⁸ Male Daughters, Female Husbands may be turning thirty this year, but the agenda it set remains as timely as ever.