The Invention of Women

A study by a Nigerian sociologist, subtitled Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Oyěwùmí argues that gender was not an organising principle of Yorùbá society before colonial rule. Western thought, she claims, is built on what she calls bio-logic: it reads social categories off visible bodies, and so treats woman as a universal category. She proposes the term world-sense in place of worldview, to mark that not every culture privileges sight. In Yorùbá, she argues, the main principle of social rank was seniority, based on relative age, and the language has gender-free pronouns and kinship terms. The terms usually translated woman and man, obìnrin and ọkùnrin, mark only anatomical difference, which she renders anafemale and anamale, without implying hierarchy. Colonial rule, missionary schooling and Western scholarship then imposed gender, creating women as a subordinate group. Critics dispute parts of her historical and linguistic evidence.

It challenges the assumption that gender categories are universal, and is a key text for anyone studying African feminism, decolonial thought or the history of gender.