Great read will share across Quora spaces, what I find interesting is while we can find African women warriors and rulers , finding an African female scholar is pretty rare or generally unknown to the public, matter of fact it's pretty rare find in most regions of the world, also while African learning centers had huge student bodies, I'm uncertain if they had female as part of the student body, although some universities were funded by wealthy women in both North Africa and West Africa.
Thanks, i think its important to highlight the stories of prominent women whose stories are overlooked, or else we risk perpetuating the sort of ignorance of african history that we seek to discredit.
Eg, its significant that unlike women rulers like Njinga who needed to appropriate aspects of political legitimacy assoicated with men in order to set the precedent for her sucessors, women scholars like Nana Asmau didnt need to assume any male atributes to be accepted as their intellectual peers, no was their career challenged on the basis of their gender (both of which were common experiences for western women in the early modern period), she and most of the 32 other women i explore in my brief compilation of women scholars across Africa appear to have suceeded in a majority-male intellectual community.
so while women scholars were numerically less than men, this wasnt a result of women scholars being considered less authoritative than their male peers. It could be because teachers (especially immediate family members who would be incharge of the primary stage of study) simply didnt put as much effort in educating female students. This could be for multiple reasons, some of which could be ideological and thus easy to change (the Fodiyawa family certainly showed how easy it was, and Nana Asmau's women groups were not suppressed nor did they face significant opposition that we know of).
Great read will share across Quora spaces, what I find interesting is while we can find African women warriors and rulers , finding an African female scholar is pretty rare or generally unknown to the public, matter of fact it's pretty rare find in most regions of the world, also while African learning centers had huge student bodies, I'm uncertain if they had female as part of the student body, although some universities were funded by wealthy women in both North Africa and West Africa.
Thanks, i think its important to highlight the stories of prominent women whose stories are overlooked, or else we risk perpetuating the sort of ignorance of african history that we seek to discredit.
Eg, its significant that unlike women rulers like Njinga who needed to appropriate aspects of political legitimacy assoicated with men in order to set the precedent for her sucessors, women scholars like Nana Asmau didnt need to assume any male atributes to be accepted as their intellectual peers, no was their career challenged on the basis of their gender (both of which were common experiences for western women in the early modern period), she and most of the 32 other women i explore in my brief compilation of women scholars across Africa appear to have suceeded in a majority-male intellectual community.
so while women scholars were numerically less than men, this wasnt a result of women scholars being considered less authoritative than their male peers. It could be because teachers (especially immediate family members who would be incharge of the primary stage of study) simply didnt put as much effort in educating female students. This could be for multiple reasons, some of which could be ideological and thus easy to change (the Fodiyawa family certainly showed how easy it was, and Nana Asmau's women groups were not suppressed nor did they face significant opposition that we know of).