Promiscuous Girls, Good Wives, and Cheating Husbands: Gender Inequality, Transitions to Marriage

Promiscuous Girls, Good Wives, and Cheating Husbands: Gender Inequality, Transitions to Marriage

Daniel Jordan Smith

The change from premarital intimate relationships and courtship to wedding and parenthood in southeastern Nigeria involves especially dramatic changes for young ladies who have actually absorbed changing some ideas about sex, wedding, and gender equality, and who may have had active premarital sexual lives. Within the eyes of culture, these ladies must transform from being promiscuous girls to good spouses. This paper examines these alterations and, particularly, just just exactly how young hitched women’s lives are influenced by the truth of male infidelity and a gendered that is persistent standard about the acceptability of extramarital intercourse.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, as with a number of other elements of the planet, young adults increasingly suppose being in love is just a basis to get hitched (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006, Cole and Thomas 2009). Historically, the increase of intimate love as a marital ideal has sometimes been observed to be connected with greater sex equality, as alterations in expectations for and techniques in wedding are linked with the erosion of a highly intercourse segregated unit of work. In a lot of settings, transformations into the characteristics of marital closeness were interpreted as providing ladies the alternative of utilizing psychological leverage using their husbands to negotiate more equitable domestic plans (Collier 1997, Hirsch 2003, Rebhun 1999). Continue reading “Promiscuous Girls, Good Wives, and Cheating Husbands: Gender Inequality, Transitions to Marriage”