Women in Ivory Coast formed less than half the country's population in 2003. Their social roles and opportunities have changed since the time of French colonialism.
From independence in 1960, women's status under the law was inferior to that of men, and this continued until the 1990s. The legal changes following President's Félix Houphouët-Boigny death brought improvement in legal and educational opportunities for women at all levels, and women have been moving into the highest levels of business and government.
Cultural traditions and practices, too, have usually marked women for inferior status. While adherence to traditional roles persists, this continuity—as well as the traditions themselves—vary greatly with place and social context. Ivory Coast has more than 60 ethnic groups, usually classified into five principal divisions: Akan (east and center, including the "Lagoon peoples" of the southeast), Krou (southwest), Mandé (Mandé west and Mandé northwest groups), and Senufo-Lobi (north center and northeast). Each of these groups has its own traditional roles for women, as do the religions practised in the country (Christian 20–30 percent, Muslim 15–20 percent, indigenous 35–50 percent).
Today's northern Ivory Coast was at the periphery of the Mali Empire and the great medieval states of the Sahel, while with Portuguese (from the 1460s) and later French colonial expansion, women of the southern regions experienced wars of colonialism and resistance firsthand. In the 1970s, Ivory Coast was considered the economic leader of West Africa, but since the 1990s, poverty and conflict have increased, at times affecting women disproportionately. The interplay of all these experiences has transformed the social roles of women in Ivorian society.
The main issue of gender equality in Ivory Coast is education. According to CIA World Factbook, the literacy rate in Ivory Coast in total is 43.1%. 53.1% of males can read and write and only 32.5% of females can read and write. This shows that more than half of men can read, and less than half of women can read. It also states that the school life expectancy for males is ten years, whereas for girls it is eight years. So far, no specific organizations have helped women education in Ivory Coast. However, many organizations have helped education for women in Africa as a whole, such as Africa Education Trust and Aid for Africa.
In order for women's education to be as equal as the men's in Ivory Coast, the government must provide more schools for free, so that the people do not think about financial issues once they put their child at school, and so the parents can afford to put both their sons and daughters in school. Education is free in Ivory Coast, but the parents must provide the school supplies, which might be a challenge if they have more than one child (Our Africa). This might lessen the need for women to go to school. For this to happen, the people must inform the government and if they refuse, protest. Education is a basic right everyone should afford, no matter the gender.
Women's roles on the eve of colonialism Ethnic and cultural groups defined women's status in different ways on the eve of colonialism, with beliefs about the role of women in society partly the result of specific ethnic background and historical circumstance. It has been argued that Ivorian cultures largely had a cultural bias against equality between the sexes, embodied in customary law and codified in the colonial period. But this view has been challenged by Ivorian writers, who argue that in many pre-colonial societies, women held political and /or economic power equal to many men.N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba. Les Africaines dans la politique : femmes baoulé de Côte-d'Ivoire. Paris, L'Harmattan (1996). See review at Pounthioun M. D. Diallo, Assié-Lumumba, N'Dri Thérèse. -- Les Africaines dans la politique : femmes baoulé de Côte-d'Ivoire. Paris, L'Harmattan, 1996, 206 pp. (« Points de vue »)., Cahiers d'études africaines, 160, 2000 Looking specifically at the N'Gongbo Baoulé people, one writer contrasts Ivorian women's roles the traditional Western tradition where the public and the private spheres are separated, with the superior public sphere reserved for men, and argues that Western intellectuals transpose this model onto "traditional" societies in Africa. Rather, the African experience is said to be characterized by coexistence of parallel positions, overlapping roles, and cross-gender cooperation.
Amongst the Mossi peoples, women's inheritance of family land and possessions, while uncommon, is possible.
Women of the Dyoula Mande peoples, living traditionally in scattered communities across in long-distance trade communities, were often powerful merchants in their own right.
The Gio or Dan people of the southwest regard domestic duties as the preserve of women, while many Mandinka women engage in farming and trade.
Women in bond labor communities, or those in cultures with strong caste systems found themselves doubly discriminated against.
From the 12th century, but progressing more deeply into the north of Ivory Coast from the 16th century, Islam defined the status of women in Muslim communities. Polygamy, practised among most Mande peoples since pre-Islamic days, was codified under Islam, which offered both protections and disadvantages. In Mande Muslim communities, the first wife has authority over any subsequent wives, sharing domestic work, and caring for the extended family, into which the wives' parents may be folded into the husbands family.
Finally, the African slave trade, beginning in the 15th century destroyed whole communities, with women killed in slave raiding and associated warfare and those enslaved separated from families, and transported to the Americas (or to neighboring states) in brutal conditions. The beginning of the direct colonial period in the 19th century brought general dislocation, warfare, and large population movements, especially in the southern forest zones of West Africa, as the French moved in from the West and South in the 1860s–90s.
Under French colonialism
Colonial law and women Role expectations for women were altered somewhat by colonial legislation, which liberated captives throughout francophone Africa in 1903, and then by the Mandel Decree of 1939, which fixed the minimum age of marriage at fourteen and made mutual consent a formal necessity for marriage. These decrees, while promulgated by colonial officials, affected rural areas only fleetingly. Bonded and caste communities remained in serfdom like conditions until at least the World War I period, when a series of population movements and communal resistance changed many of these dependence relationships. Wars during the early colonial period caused an increase in slave taking, in which women were separated from men and moved into new communities.see Martin Klein. Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa. Cambridge University Press (1998) : pp. 132–37, 208–209, 237–240. As the title indicates, Klein is concerned with the persistence of African slavery under French rule. He argues that customary law and French appointed chiefs allowed formal slavery to continue in some areas up to the 1920s, and the social relationship to survive through independence. The Jacquinot Decree of 1951 invoked the power of the state to protect women from claims to their services—by their own or their husband's family—after marriage, and enabled women to obtain a divorce more easily and invalidated in-laws' claims to any bride-price that had been paid to a woman's family to legitimize the marriage. This decree also recognized monogamy as the only legal form of marriage and allowed couples to marry without parental consent. Small numbers of girls were offered primary education by the French government (in urban areas), while Catholic missions, offered education to others, especially in the south.Virginia Thompson, Richard Adloff. French West Africa. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. (1958) pp. 527–28, 580–82
At the same time, almost the entire population of the colony were colonial Subjects, ruled under the French Code de l'Indigénat. In practice, this meant that women, like men, were ruled by decrees from a handful of French Cercle Commanders, who administered with little oversight, and carried out policies through a series of French appointed "Canton chiefs". "Customary" law, outside Muslim areas, was usually rule decided by appointed chiefs and their officials, while only whites and a tiny number of educated African men were subject to French courts. Whatever decrees issued at the colonial capital in Dakar were implemented at the discretion of local commanders, who usually preferred to leave social concerns to chiefs.Jean Suret-Canele. French Colonialism in Tropical Africa 1900–1945. Trans. Pica Press (1971)
Colonial dislocation Women were especially affected by three colonial practices that increased in the early 20th century: forced labor, taxation, and military draft. All of French West Africa was subject to periodic forced labor campaigns, which peaked in the 1930s, and declined thereafter. Ivory Coast was unique, though, in that the north of the colony had white run cotton plantations, for which locals were pressed into service when migrant labor (mostly from modern Burkina Faso) was unavailable. Unlike road building or other forced labor projects, for which men were called up for a period ranging from days to months, men (and some women) were pressed into cotton work for years at a time. While only a small number of women were drafted into French labor schemes, the process of taking men out of their communities for long periods of time meant that women were forced to provide for their communities.Jean Suret-Canele. op sit, pp. 233, 247–48, 253–256. Detailing forced contracts as long as two years (paid only at the end of contract) in Cote d'Ivoire, Congo and Madagascar for cotton plantations, forestry, and public works. Myron Echenberg, Jean Filipovich: "African Military Labour and the Building of the Office du Niger Installations, 1925–1950" in The Journal of African History, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1986) Details the 1926 decree allowing long term forced labor for the building of a vast irrigation system for a largely unpopulated area, where it was never used This, from the beginning of the 20th century, also meant some involvement in the marketplace, as French colonial taxation (in currency) superseded taxation in kind from the 1930s to 1950s.Andrew, C. M. and Kanya-Forstner, A. S.: "French Business and the French Colonialists" The Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec. 1976) Suret-Canale, Jean. 1966. "La Fin de la Chefferie en Guinée," Journal of African History, Vol. VII, No. 3, pp. 459–93 Women were also placed in positions of independence due to the recruitment of African troops (the Tirailleurs) which was especially heavy in Ivory Coast during the World Wars. Men who survived these experiences came home less likely to accept the strictures of colonial or customary rule, and while they were away, women were forced to provide for, and sometimes lead, communities.Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960. Heinemann (1990), Nancy Ellen Lawler. Soldiers of Misfortune: Ivorien Tirailleurs of World War II. Ohio Univ Press (1992)
Independence struggle