THEMATIC EXPLORATION OF BUCHI EMECHETA THE JOYS OF MOTHERHOOD AND SECOND CLASS CITIZEN, A RESEARCH PROJECT TOPIC ON ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC
CHAPTER ONE
General INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the study
Feminist movement emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and America respectively. Before this time, women were regarded as the oppressed group. Women have contributed a great deal to industrial activities with the introduction of feminism. This is to say that women became members of the working class in labour market thus, paving way for new industries centres. A feminist concept therefore consists of taking interest in the life styles, activities and occupation of women both at home and in societal growth. Feminism believes that women have been denied their rights as human beings in a world ruled by men and that they need to be liberated from patriarchy.
Feminism is also a world-wide ideology and political movement directed at changing the existing power relations between man and women. It is a social theory that highlights the inequalities in the male and female relationship in any society where patriarchal hegemony is practised. Patriarch is an ideology that gives men confidence to subordinate the female or treat, the female as an inferior being, men in such society hide under guise of patriarchy to subjugate women by a system of sex role stereotyping to which they are subjected from the early age. Thus, feminism as an ideology, according to Achufusi in feminist inclination of Flora Nwapa (1994:164), came about from the realization that a woman can never hope to have the proper recompense for her services until her usefulness and her success in life are not only demonstrated but fully understood and acknowledged.The early feminist believed that the solution to women subjugation should come from a political movement since patriarchy is tagged an oppressive political system.
However, woman quickly recognized the realities of their new situation and as the century wore on, became the focus of an emergent feminist movement. Pressure for the right to maintenance and custody in the event of divorce or separation began as early as the 1830s. The Governess Benevolent Institution was founded in 1843 and was followed by a long campaign to improve women’s education opportunities, a campaign to improve women’s education opportunities, a campaign which included, the founding of Queen’s and Bedford Colleges in 1869 and 1871 respectively: The first attempt by a woman to register as a medicalstudent was as early as 1856, and the first parliamentary Bill to give married women the right to own property was introduced in the same year in Britain, Patricia Stubbs (1920:3).
Feminism as an ideology later finds a fertile ground in Africa in the 1960’s. Obioma Nnemeka (1995:40) establishes the functional purpose of the discourse when she asserts that “it provides the opportunity of re-evaluating attitudes and misconception about women which have been buttressed all along both by African culture and misogynous traditions of European colonial masters”.
