Yoruba Proverbs About Women and the Psychology of Male Chauvinism

Proverbs in every human culture are special features that are used to embellish communication and to teach moral values. They often portray the traditional beliefs and social practices of people in a particular society and serve as guides towards moral rectitude. However some proverbs are unreasonable by virtue of their prejudice and irrelevance to modern day realities. Such proverbs include those that demean the female gender. Often a reflection of traditional gender bias in a patriarchal and chauvinistic society of yester-years, such proverbs often recur in modern society. Since culture is dynamic and grows alongside social realities, such proverbs are anomalous. The average modern woman is no longer the servile, docile, uneducated, husband-reliant, baby-manufacturing machine and domestic servant which traditional African culture made women about a century ago. Moreover, some of the proverbs that denigrate women are simply based on bias, hearsay, misogyny and megalomania. There is therefore a need to obliterate them. This paper examines fifteen of such proverbs. The proverbs are translated or transliterated from their Yoruba original, and analysed in terms of meaning, usage, literariness and gender bias. The unreasonableness of each one is made obvious in a contrastive analysis with current realities. It concludes that since advanced societies have retraced their steps (through Gender Equity Projects, Women’s Rights Movements etc) Africans too, especially the Yoruba race, should do the same by expunging insulting proverbs from their proverbs repertory.

Proverbs, Chauvinism, Embellish

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