User:Alyssaelmore/African feminism

The term 'African feminism' can also be interpreted as feminism for Africa. This is seen as problematic by multiple scholars, since Africa is a continent made up of many different countries, so the term "African Feminism" can suggest that all women in Africa face the same issues, which is not the case. Africa cannot be made to be one when it is made up of many diverse countries, with different cultures and experiences women may have.

Colonial roots of gender inequality in Africa suggests that slavery and colonialism is the origin of inequality amongst men and women in Africa. In the pre-colonial area, women held positions of prominence, contributing to society socially and economically in a patrilineal society by managing the younger family members and being involved with international trade. According to Azodo, "There existed a complementarity of male and female roles in precolonial African societies and that it is during and after colonization that the downfall of the African woman from a position of power and self-sovereignty to becoming man's helper occurred." In Edo and Yoruba cultures, Queen-mothers were a title a king's mother or a free woman with notable status would receive. They would officiate meetings and have subordinate title-holders assisting her. Yoruba and Hausa legends claim that women were even able to hold the title of king. However, this changed in the 20th century with patriarchy and colonialism changing the position of women in society. Female chiefs lost their power as male chiefs began to negotiate with colonial powers.Western ideas about patriarchy that promoted the female dependency on men was superimposed on colonized communities' educational, political, and economic sectors in Africa.

Representation in Politics
In the early 1900s, female representation in politics declined due to the repressive nature of the colonial regime. Male suppression against women in these spaces increased after many African countries reached independence, even with the contributions women had made politically. Woman are now trying to overcome these obstacles written into law that put them at a disadvantage, through legal programs, women's movements, and the African National Congress (ANC) Women's League's demands for greater female political representation in South Africa. The post-cold war era of the 1990s removed women's fear and reluctance to speak up politically when pressures by contemporary national economic crises and political failure required their assistance.

There have been many instances of groups of Women fighting for and expressing their need to be involved and hold rights politically in Africa. During the first Liberian War in 1994, The Concerned Woman of Liberia was a politically involved group that arose alongside The Liberian Women's Initiative to encourage the warring groups and the government to bargain, and would conduct public protests when agreements were not being kept. Also, In the 1990s, the Lakoja State House in Nigeria carried workshops, where women would discusses the necessity and process for achieving changes in legislation for material and legal rights for women, with national recognition of women's rights under law and constitution.

Education
Women in many countries in Africa continue to be denied an education, with disparities starting in primary school and widening not long after that. According to Female education, early colonial forms of education for women in West Africa came from missionaries and institutions using religious teachings and basic western teachings in reading and writing. They ignored teaching women economic education, and instead taught European values of women's roles in society into educational spaces. These western teachings extended to post-colonial education, prioritizing men's education, which lead to wide disparities within education. 43.6% of men completed primary education compared to 35.4% of women, 6.0% of men completed secondary education compared to 3.3% of women, and 0.7% of men completed tertiary education compared to 0.2% of women. Colonial teachings caused families to prioritize women doing domestic labor compared to men, which carried on to post-colonial values. When Austerity programmes were introduced to African countries in the 1980s, it cut educational spending, and households had to choose who to send to schools, which caused many homes to prioritize housework over education for women and education for the men, leading to these low retention rates.

Organizations like the Batonga Foundation and the Umlambo Foundation in Sub-Sahara Africa focus on empowering and increasing women's access to education in Africa, while improving the quality of education to close this gap between men and women in the classroom. There also were policies specifically targeting girls education that began to be implemented in Benin, Botswana, the Gambia, Guinea, Lesotho, Mauritania and Namibia that began to shrink this gender gap.The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization reported that the enrollment for women also rose with an increase of the proportion of teachers that were women. Although there have been promising improvements in providing an equal education for women, they are still behind many other places in the world in terms of women's education.