2000 BCE–present: (West African Women as Independent Economic Actors — Whether in Patrilineal or Matrilineal Societies Women Have Been from Far Back in the P…

2000 BCE–present: (West African Women as Independent Economic Actors — Whether in Patrilineal or Matrilineal Societies Women Have Been from Far Back in the Past Independent Social and Economic Actors Because Marriage Did Not Make Them Economic Dependents of Their Husbands, Major Commercial Entrepreneurs in Recent Nigerian History Very Often Being Women Including Muslim Women in Previous Centuries, Women in the Territories of the Kingdom of Benin Being the Weavers of Cotton and Raffia Textiles the Major Exports of the State and Controlling Access to Their Products): Widely across West Africa, whether in patrilineal or matrilineal societies, women have been from far back in the past, and continue today to be, independent social and economic actors. They have held such positions because marriage did not and does not make women in those societies economic dependents of their husbands. The major commercial entrepreneurs in recent Nigerian history, for example, have very often been women; and it turns out that women — and not just followers of the old Niger-Congo religion, but also Muslim women — were major commercial figures in that region in previous centuries as well. In the trades and occupations that women carried out, they were everywhere the owners of the products of their labor. In the territories that were incorporated in the fourteenth century CE into the emerging kingdom of Benin, women were the weavers of cotton and raffia textiles, the major exports of this state even during the slave trade era, and they controlled access to their products and were prime beneficiaries of that commerce. Women, in other words, have not been always and everywhere oppressed in previous ages, and their economic, social, cultural, and in many cases political agency is part and parcel of the broader human history we very much need to be telling. This is not a claim about a few exceptional women rising above their circumstances. This is a claim about the structural position of women in entire societies — societies where economic independence was not an achievement to be fought for but a normal feature of the social order, where a woman’s labor belonged to her, where her products were her property, and where her commercial activities were not an exception to the rule but the rule itself. The kingdom of Benin’s major exports were produced by women. The wealth of the state rested on female labor and female entrepreneurship. And this was not anomalous. It was typical of a vast swath of West Africa, across centuries, across religious boundaries, across the divide between patrilineal and matrilineal kinship systems.