The Invention Of Women

I love, love, love fictional worlds that reimagine gender, but nothing can beat real life!

The Invention of Women is an accessible and riveting description of how the Yoruba people in West Africa organize a culture based on seniority rather than Western binary genders. This is a mind-blowing book for anyone who is interested in gender and how human beings don’t have to be trapped in one way of doing things. 

Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s was the first book I encountered when I started to critically engage with Western feminist scholarship as a Master's student in the UK.

This book made a major intervention by challenging theories of gender in Western social sciences and questioning their relevance to African societies. I especially loved the book because Oyěwùmí offered a detailed presentation of gender realities in the Oyo-Yorùbá society of Nigeria that paid attention to human relations holistically and situationally and did not assume gender inequality on the basis of female/male bodies.

A must-read analysis for anyone working to decolonize gender theory.