Gender Roles In Things Fall Apart

In Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart the reader is given a vivid picture of traditional Igbo culture and the role of gender within that culture. In the book the roles of men and women are very strict and traditional. The women do all the cooking, cleaning, child raising, and some of the farming. The men are pretty much waited on hand and foot and they, of course, also do the ‘manly’ things like hunting, governing, and some of the more ‘masculine’ aspects of the farming. Traditional gender outlines do not just exist in this story, they exist in real life as well. Just because someone is a man does not mean they are better.
Women historically are viewed as lesser than men, and pre-colonial times in Africa are no exception. Achebe paints the picture to seem as though women do not really matter and as if one is truly no different from the next. For example, “The elders, or ndichie, met to hear a report of Okonkwo’s mission. At the end they decided, as everybody knew they would, that the girl should go to Ogbuefi Udo to replace his murdered wife. As for the boy, he belonged to the clan as a whole, and there was no hurry to decide his fate” They took no time at all in deciding the fate of the young girl, she was to replace his wife. It did not really matter to them, this girl was no different from Ogbuefi’s wife as far as

This shows how lowly women are perceived in Igbo society. Okonkwo’s wives are rarely referred to by their names and are simply referred to either by their relationship to their husband or to their son like how she is called ‘Nwoye’s mother’. The treatment of women in Things Fall Apart is similar, but less severe, than the treatment of women in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the