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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Gender and Aging: Are Women 'Warriors' among the Glebo of Liberia? |
Author: | Moran, Mary H. |
Year: | 2000 |
Periodical: | Liberian Studies Journal |
Volume: | 25 |
Issue: | 2 |
Pages: | 25-41 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Liberia |
Subjects: | gender relations Grebo generations Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Women's Issues Cultural Roles Sex Roles |
Abstract: | Well-meaning attempts to discover a system among women that is comparable to men's age grades perpetuate the assessment of female age-based organizations as derivative and imitative of men's. The assumption that age is a natural ranking mechanism which affects all members of a society equally precludes the possibility that people may age quite differently in the same culture. Based on fieldwork in southeastern Liberia in 1982-1983, the author makes a case for the differential aging of men and women among the Cape Palmas Glebo. In the dual-sex structures characteristic of many African political systems, including that of the Glebo, women's political participation and the authority-bearing roles they hold are based not on age but on achievement, speaking ability, and sometimes marriage to office-holding men. It is this parallel political structure which Frederick D. McEvoy (1971) mistook for women's age grades among the Sabo. Trying to force Glebo women's political structures into a strained parallelism with men's age grades obscures the real structural basis of women's political autonomy and authority in southeastern Liberia. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |