Chinweizu - Anatomy of female power: A masculinist dissection of matriarchy

Note to the digital edition: all printing errors have been preserved. As spelling was inconsistent, we standardized it making it British. Numbering is consigned between {brackets} at the end of each page, thus preserving the original as much as possible.

Anatomy of Female Power

In this brief treatise, Chinweizu challenges one of the fundamental premises of feminism. He shows how women rule men and have always ruled men; and he outlines what men might do to reduce female power, and so advance toward equality, in hardships and privileges, with women.

Chinweizu is a Nigerian cultural critic, poet and occidentalist. His books, essays and newspaper articles have been published in Africa, Europe and North America. His popular column, "The Chinweizu Observatory", appears in the Sunday Vanguard (Lagos).

He brings to his cultural analysis his skills as a. journalist, his experiences as a traveller, and his training in various disciplines: Mathematics and Philosophy (M.I.T.), American Studies and History (S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo), and post-doctoral research in Economics (M.I.T.). His recreations are dancing and mathematics.

Pero Press

P.O. Box

FestacTown

Lagos, Nigeria.

Chinweizu, 1990

First Published

Second printing

ISBN 978 2651 05 2

October 1990

November 1990

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior and written permission of the publisher.

Printed in Nigeria

Dedication

To the handful of women now in my life (platonic friends, lovers, ex-lovers, lovers-to-be);

To the countless others who have slipped in and out of my life; and especially

To those who have attempted to marry me:

From them I have learnt most of what I know about women. {v}

Epigraphs

The object of woman's existence is not to war with man, or allow man to war with her, but simply to conquer him and hold him in subservience without so much as a threat or a blow. Clever women always do this; clever women have always done it.

- Marie Corelli, British novelist.

What woman hasn't been able to wrap a man around her fingers, if she puts her mind to it?

- Regina Joseph, Nigerian columnist.

You think: We men are clever. If you see womankind and watch how four or five of them sit together and tell each other things, you think: Instead of chatting here, they ought to get up, go home and cut grass. As you talk like this to each other, you think in your own minds: They are stupid and ignorant. See, my grandchild, they are not stupid. Nothing in the whole world is cleverer than the female sex. Know this: If you are as other men, you are not as intelligent as a woman ... I tell you: a woman is clever. And if you respect what is woman's business your reputation will not suffer. And your wife will honour you, because she knows that you have learnt to keep quiet like other men.

- Teachings of the Chagga Elders of T anzan ia. {vi}

Contents

Epigraphs vi

Prologue: Who Rules Who - Man or Woman

Part I: Features of Female

The Five Pillars of Female Power

Womb, Kitchen and Cradle: Control Centres of Female Power

Part II: Mother p ower - In the Nest of His Father s Matriarch

The Commandant of the Cradle

Part III: Bridepower - In the Cockpit of Courtship

The Powers of Her Body-beautiful

Love: Male and Female

Courtship: The Hunting of the Love-smitten Man

Wedding: The Bride's Triumph Ceremony

Part IV: Wifepower - In the Nest of His Own Matriarch

The Husband Managers

The Facade of Patriarchy

The Double Standard

The Silly Souls of Men

Man's Fear of Woman

The Baby as Wife's Weapon

The Penalties of Divorce

Part V: Matriarchy and its Discontents

The Matriarch: Sovereign of Her Nest

Feminism: A Revolt in Paradise

Epilogue: On Masculinism

Notes

{vii}

Prologue

Who Rules Who - Man or Woman?

In the last couple of decades, feminist propaganda has sought to per suade the world that women are powerless in society, and that men are natural oppressors of women. It claims that wives are subordinate to their husbands in the home; and that, outside the home, men have excluded women from political, economic and cultural power.

Some, like Ellen Galford of Britain, say: "Women are slaves and men are masters". 4

Some, like Andrea Dworkin of the USA, say: "All housewives are economically exploited; all working women are". 5

And some, like Carol Hanisch of the USA, have even gone so far to deny that women have any power at a ll over men.

The term men's liberation was derived, from the term womens liberation and thus insinuates that women have power over men. Its very name infers liberation from female domination and is therefore an inversion of fact as well as women's liberation principles. 6

As a rule, those few women have not been taken seriously who have bothered to acknowledge female power over men: like Denyse Plummer, the Trinidadian calypso singer, who proclaims that "woman is boss; 7 or like the expatriate Nigerian actress Patti Boulaye, who says: "most men are controlled by women; 8 or like the Argentinian, Esther Vilar, who said:

Women let men work for them, think for them and take on their responsibilities - in fact, they exploit them. 9 {9}

This great division of opinion among women should prompt one to ask: Which kind of claim is true? Which picture is the illusion, and which the reality?

Conventional modern opinion, as well as the social science consensus, would appear to support the feminist picture. It is conventionally assumed that female power, if it existed, would be wielded by women, through some public system of authority. It is also held, by conventional expert opinion, that matriarchs (who would be the natural wielders of female power) are illusory; and that matriarchy (a system of females wielding authority) does not exist.

For instance, The Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th Edition, 1976) defines a matriarch as a "woman corresponding in status to a patriarch (usually jocular)". The venerable compilers of that dictionary add that the word is derived "from Latin mater mother on false analogy of patriarch". Treating the notion as a joke derived on a "false analogy" suggests that matriarchs are illusory, phantom figures. However, powerful matrons, often elderly, who dominate family groups and clans, who are patriarchs in all but their gender, are neither unknown nor rare.

Similarly, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica , (15th Edition, 1986) matriarchy is a "social system in which familial and political authority is wielded by women". And that repository of conventional knowledge adds that "the consensus among modern anthropologists and sociologists is that a strictly matriarchal society never existed." This is despite the fact that, in some African and Native American societies, women did have their structures of political authority parallel to and countervailing those of men.

When a definition will not allow us to acknowledge what is before us, it is flawed. For example, if we defined the sun as a square star, it would then be, strictly speaking, true that there isn't and never has been a sun. But since such a claim flies in the face of our experience, we would have to reject that definition for not capturing the reality, and for misleading us into the absurdity of denying the existence of the sun we can see and point at. On similar grounds, we would have to reject the conventional definitions of matriarch and matriarchy for flying in the face of the examples cited above.

In any case, even if no "strictly matriarchal society" ever existed, that would not imply that female power did not exist. Authority is only one of the many types of power; and the wielding of authority is not necessary for the exercise of many types of power. Power without authority {10} is neither unknown nor rare, as is recognized when it is said that someone is "the power behind the throne".