GENDER ROLES AND WOMEN LABOUR IN PRE-COLONIAL BENIN

Abstract

This study discusses gender roles and women labour in Pre-colonial Benin. African gender scholarship is increasingly gaining traction, and the appropriation of gender to women’s history in the Pre-colonial period is substantiated in the right to inheritance, succession, title holding, ritual worship and other cultures. Benin oral tradition is replete with accounts of cultural sensitivity to gender roles and women labour and this has been interpreted by some writings as the masculinization of women’s history. The study therefore addresses this phenomenon by explicating the dimensions of gender roles in Pre-colonial Benin, with reference to women’s labour as situated in culture. Using primary and secondary sources of data, the study adopts the gender theory to show how women in Pre-colonial Benin negotiated their roles within the ambits of societal expectations. Findings from the study revealed that women generally participated in domestic activities that did not often require any form of specialization. However, as was the case with agriculture, there existed a division of labour according to gender and specialization in manufacture, art and craft production. Admittedly, gender specificity was more prominent in areas of male dominance which were enabled by cultural structures that inhibited female enterprise.