Flexible gender: male daughters and female husbands

Igbo society was patrilineal and men held most formal offices, but gender was more flexible than the word “patriarchy” suggests. Ifi Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands (1987), summarized in Korieh (2009), describes arrangements at Nnobi in which a daughter could be treated as a male in relation to the wives of the lineage and a woman of means could take a wife, becoming a “female husband” and founding a line. In the book’s discussion of status, Dorothy Ukaegbu adds that the word dimkpa, “strong person”, could be extended to exceptional women.

Work was divided by crop. Men grew yam, “the king of crops”, and women cultivated cocoyam, cassava and vegetables, processed palm oil and ran local markets. Raphael Njoku emphasizes that markets sat outside chiefly control and that women bargained as equals.

The same sources are clear about limits. Women could not take most titles and, as J. Akuma-Kalu Njoku shows, the slave trade and colonial change reshaped gender and class by increasing women’s farm labour and, in some regions, the number of wives of wealthy men. Scholars therefore describe Igbo gender as flexible and contested, not egalitarian.