Women’s status is a topic of considerable importance. Its significanceis indicated by the fact that it would seem odd indeed in most societies to discuss the status of men.
Instead, the rights and duties enjoyed, or owed, by men are generally the norm by differentiation from which women acquire their distinctive status. Thus the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences contains articles on ‘Woman, Position in Society’,1 but the only entry under ‘Man’2 deals with the evolution of homo sapiens and gives as its first reference Man’s Place Among the Mammals.
It seems inevitable to start at this point, although the risk is run thereby of forfeiting the attention of those who enjoy—or suffer—the status here discussed and who may question this writer’s sincerity because he does not. Women no doubt accept the voluminous attention accorded them in modem times as a compliment to their sex. The spate of literature specifically concerned with women’s status is so great that, in the later stages of preparing this discussion, one is tempted to ask the poet’s question:Why do I prate
Of women, that are things against my fate?3
No defence can be offered for this attempt to add to the flood of documentation, but two pleas may be allowed in mitigation. First, the urgency of some problems calling for reform of the law to keep pace with the fast changing position of women in developing countries of Africa justifies repetition. Secondly, the writer would say, with the women’s status and law reform author of a recent book on the Women of Africa, ‘the more of them I met the more interested I became’.1
It is well, however, to commence this consideration by recalling some lines of an eminent transatlantic authority:
I attribute much of our modem tension
To a misguided striving for intersexual comprehension. It’s about time to realize, brethren, as best we can, That a woman is not just a female man.2