Based on this, I would say that religion effected gender roles in Yoruba culture by simply making the people aware of gender and it’s hierarchy in certain religions.įinally, how does the role of gender play into their societies government? To first answer this we need to know what type of government they conduct. At one point in history, a woman must pray to her husband’s Ifa and find her spiritual fate through her husbands (Peel). One consequence of this primary gender being the heads of religion is that the Yoruba people began to establish a hierarchy in religion based on gender (Peel).
Christian pastors and Muslim Babalawo were predominately men. In Africa, more specifically, Yoruba, we have to understand that the Yoruba people worship many gods who did not have genders placed upon them (Peel).The influence of other religions started to help differentiate and define gender.
What it interesting is that in Yoruban religion, women are typically the most respected of traditional priests (Ember). The largest findings of Muslim and Christians followers are in the Yoruba ethnic group. Fifty percent of Nigeria are Muslims, forty percent are Christian, and ten percent practice ingenious religions (Ember). Let’s explore what the effects of religion has been in regards to gender roles. There has been an obvious increase in polygamous marriages and I think that this stems from the encounter of new religions brought during colonialism. The leader of the Yoruba people, King Ojaja, has three wives and a recent divorce to his would have been fourth wife (). That is not the case today, one prime example of expressing polygamy is the Ooni of Ife. Also according to Johnson, the Yoruba people were traditionally monogamous and polygamy was reserved for the wealthy.
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One thing that does seem to have changed is that divorce was not a common occurrence in precolonial times and now a days a man has the free privilege to divorce a wife (Johnson). A woman was considered to be a possession of the family that she marries into, being passed to a brother if her husband died or the family having rights to the children she bore (Johnson). A woman’s place in society was once based on her being a daughter of her father and one of the In Yoruba, marriage is expected of each sex at the socially deemed appropriate age, women in their twenties and men in their thirties. Speaking of domestic roles, one interesting place to study is the Yoruba culture’s marriages and traditions in regards to gender roles. In a review of McIntosh’s book, another scholar Insa Nolte, concluded that, “Yoruba women adapted their skills to support more widespread cultural notions as well as continuing their domestic roles” (Nolte).
According to McIntosh in her book Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change, she summarizes that independent roles were played by women on agriculture and trade until colonial ideas about “female professions” changed the career paths of women (McIntosh). I don’t think that they shifted negatively for women, I believe it gave women more opportunity to have careers that they wished. In Yoruba I found that as time has changed and more outside influences were in contact with the Yoruba, the more the gender roles in Yoruba shifted. I found that in over sixteen countries people believe that men have the first right to jobs, that they believe males are more fit for political positions, and that women should have children to be fulfilled (Weziak-Bialowolska). To get these answer, I began to read about the differences in gender normality’s across different countries.
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