Okonkwo Gender Roles

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I have chosen to write about Okonkwo and why gender matters to him. Okonkwo is portrayed as a very masculine man who has much faith in the quality of "manliness". Okonkwo has three wives and each with their own hut.

Okonkwo speaks words on how anything strong was to men and anything weak to women , Okonkwo was known to despise anything fragile and weak. But then why did he have three wives? Not only did he did he think all women were

weak but anything weak was women. These gender roles Okonkwo thought also effected the way he treated his son Nwoye and daughter Enzima.

Okonkwo wives and children lived in fear of his temper. They were overworked during planting season because Okonkwo expected them to have the same resistance …show more content…
He felt stronger and powerful knowing he could dominate over the weakly which he knew as women. It is all an act though, behind all the masculine and power he is hurt

because of his father. But the idea he has created keeps his ego up and his fear locked away.

Anything weak was automatically women according to Okonkwo. He felt this way because he had once found that agabala was a name for woman and also men with no title, and thats what his father was. It says in the book

that "Okonkwo was ruled by one passion , to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved" ( Achebe , ch. 2, pg 5). Okonkwo was a coward that beat his wives because of this thought. As he is known to despise fragility , he beat his son

Nwoye to correct his some traits he had seen. He had noticed laziness and similar traits of his father in Nwoye and tried his best to rid those traits. Okonkwo was blinded by a fear of the no title on his father.

Nwoye and Enzima were to siblings treated different from their father because of gender. Okonkwo was the father of Enzima and Nwoye but from different wives. Enzima was favored because according to him she had

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