Gender Roles In Things Fall Apart

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Within gender and sexuality women have proven historically and culturally that we can make a difference and control our role. Women are underestimated and have the potential to be even greater/more valuable than the treatment received, although there were times when that was yet to be the case. As an example, in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the setting is Umuofia a village in Nigeria Africa, males are seen as the dominant gender and can be abusive towards their wives. The women can not participate in 'male ' activities or jobs yet the chief and earth goddesses are women and strongly respected and feared by everybody. Contradicting the story itself, because the villagers respect their goddess, yet the villages presented are male based …show more content…

Umuofia is a “male-dominated society in which the chief goddess is female and in which proverbial wisdom maintains ‘mother is supreme’”(Nnormele, 274) as explained by Achebe himself. Things Fall Apart brings you way back to a day and age where both males and females each had their life task set up for them based on their gender. Males were meant to do masculine things such as having “wives, yam barns, social titles [which were] the highest accolades for the successful farmer, warrior, and man of worth.” (Mezu 212) determining his social status and women do “the core of the rural workforce ‐farming, tending animals, nurturing children, among other activities.”(Mezu, 212). Feminism is seen as an insult and dehumanizing for the men. At a young age boys aren 't suppose to hang around their mother anymore but be with their father and learn things with out a filter or censor about the world. You see this when Nwoya is now in the hut with Okonkwo hearing stories, the stories are about war and so on. While there Nwoya understands that he has to be there and hear those things because of masculinity but he much rather be in his mothers hut hearing the stories she tells the little

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