Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society

Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society challenges orthodoxies in social anthropology by arguing that sex and gender did not necessarily coincide in precolonial Igbo society. Amadiume demonstrates that roles were based on factors beyond biological sex, utilizing the flexible Knobi gender system to explain the possibility of woman-to-woman marriage. In this system, a female husband refers to a male's wife who has subsequently acquired another woman as her own wife. The work posits that before European colonization, African society was largely egalitarian regarding sex, as detailed in GradeSaver's analysis.

Published in 1987, the text preceded the emergence of queer theory by more than a decade and has since been recognized as a critically acclaimed work that opens gender theory to African philosophies of being and power. The research is based on fieldwork conducted between 1980 and 1982, as well as statistics from the early 1970s. Its lasting scholarly impact is reflected in retrospectives published in the Journal of West African History and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Ifi Amadiume is a Nigerian poet, anthropologist, and essayist born on April 23, 1947. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in 1984 and later became a Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College in 1993. Her academic contributions, characterized by the application of theory to activism, have been described as Amadiumeism. Over her career, she has authored or contributed to 13 different works.