Berkley Center

As girl growing up in America in the 1990s, I was not aware of gender discrimination until I learned about the suffragettes in elementary school. Even then, discrimination against women was an abstract notion—an outdated, backwards idea of the past that modern society had done away with. The only thing I heard as a child on the subject of my future as a woman was along the lines of how I could be anything I wanted to be.

This set up a large surprise for life in Dakar, in a society that is 95 percent Muslim, with very specific ideas about the role of women in society. Despite this level of specificity about how women should be good housewives and mothers, and about their secondary status compared to men, gender relations are very complicated and much less cut and dried than simply the gender dynamics of conservative Islam.

The most obvious manifestation of this is polygamy. Not only is polygamy technically legal, it is widely accepted throughout modern Senegalese society—a large number of my friends on the program live in families that share their father between two or more homes. In some cases, the two wives and their children live in houses right next door to one another. In fact, in my Wolof language class, the words for first wife, second wife, third wife, and fourth wife were featured on the vocabulary list for the unit on the family.

However, the societal manifestations of the belief in the inferiority of women stretch much farther than just the legality of polygamy. My host family is Catholic, and so they do not believe in polygamy. However, this does not mean that they see women’s equality in the same manner as I have grown up with. I realized this one night at dinner as my host father told a story about a cousin. This cousin was recently married and, one night, his new wife asked him to stop watching TV and help her clean up the dinner dishes. This was the punch line of the story, after which everyone in my family laughed uproariously.

Since I did not laugh along, the story was explained again, more slowly, since they thought that I just had not understood the French. “Chez les toubabs,” my dad said, “the wife orders the husband around. But here, chez les senegalais, we know how it is really supposed to be in marriage.”

This incident evidences how the Senegalese attitude about women is not as integrally linked with Islam as I had supposed. While the Catholic faith is often criticized for some of its policies regarding restrictions on women in the Church hierarchy, it does not share the same rigor of beliefs about the role of women in orthodox Islam. Yet, if the monogamous and polygamous, Islamic and Christian alike, members of Senegalese society share the same general attitude towards women, and it is not due to a shared religion, what is the explanation?

It might come next to point to “traditional values” as the root of these ideas about men and women, and the lack of feminist sentiments in society. The problem with that explanation is that most of the groups who formed the foundation for the Senegalese people today, are, for the most part, traditionally matriarchal societies. Children were given their mother’s name as identification rather than their father’s.

This changed with the advent of the arrival of Islam in Senegal. Islam/Arab culture effectively created a patriarchal society in place of the traditional matriarchal one. This was a hugely powerful change—effectively reversing gender dynamics that had been in place for centuries, with the introduction of a new religion.

Of course, it is not as clear-cut as that. Women, like my host mother, still obviously are very much in charge of their home and direct all household operations. They are highly respected and seen as the center of the home. A friend’s host father, who has two wives, has told us before that he thinks women are much smarter than men, and that he trusts women with business much more than men. It is these complexities of attitude that make the subject so nuanced, and admittedly frustrating at times, to deal with.

It is particularly interesting to observe the change occurring in gender dynamics among the new generation of Senegalese. Many young Senegalese proudly state that they are looking for relationships and marriage based on love. Dating is now a common social occurrence, and young couples can be seen displaying affecting in public, if somewhat rarely.

But even so, couples tend to marry young, and women tend to then focus on a family rather than on a career. Additionally, despite this trend, polygamy continues to be practiced among the younger generation: I was asked the other day if I wanted to be the fourth wife of a man who was, at most, 25 years old. I might have thought he was joking, if it had not been for the three wedding rings on his hands.

To conclude, religion has obviously been very influential on the dynamics of gender relations in Senegal. At some point, certain religious ideas about the role of women seem to have become so ingrained in the culture that they now transcend religious boundaries. Modern life appears to be changing these norms, if slowly, but it remains a very complex and delicate topic, to say the least.