African Women

Paper Summary:

This paper examines African women and the dual challenges of maintaining their culture while also furthering their status in society during a time where the very nature of those goals lies on tentative ground. The paper illustrates how African women's dual social and political contributions have helped sustain the cultural binds common to most African communities while also improving the status of women within the society.

From the Paper:

"The African continent constitutes a myriad of types of societies and as well as a melange of distinct heritages. Africa's diverse population has been, for thousands of years, continuously organizing into compact communities with shared languages, religions, or common descent. The majority of Africans live in small towns or villages where self-sufficient compounds are established and close knit family units are created. In the pre-colonial hunter/gatherer societies which made up most of the first 'traditional' African societies, women did almost all of the work whereas the men were quite lazy. In these societies men were often gone for weeks on end as their role was to forage for food while the women held the community together. These early societies also tended to be matrimonial."

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