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Ivory Coast
Index
Houphouët-Boigny's political style and longevity shaped
Ivoirian elites into a wealthy, male, educated social
stratum. By
the late 1980s, women were beginning to emerge within this
group,
as education and acculturation enabled them to challenge
the
established order. Official attitudes toward the status of
women
were pragmatic, like most official attitudes in Côte
d'Ivoire.
Beliefs about the role of women in society were partly the
result
of ethnic conditioning, however, and the cultural bias
against
equality between the sexes was embodied in customary law,
where
ethnic diversity and cultural conservatism slowed the pace
of
modernization of regulations regarding women.
Role expectations for women changed, however, altered
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. 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. Moreover, it 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.
These
changes altered popular perceptions of marriage and
established the
colonial government as the authority on most aspects of
the status
of women.
At independence, the government of Houphouët-Boigny
acknowledged existing decrees affecting the status of
women and
went on to establish the primacy of the nuclear family,
raise the
minimum age for marriage to eighteen, and condemn in
general terms
the notion of female inferiority. At the same time,
however,
legislation during the 1960s established a husband's right
to
control much of his wife's property, and it required a
woman to
obtain her husband's permission to establish a bank
account or
obtain a job. The government also placed restrictions on a
woman's
right to divorce, denied legal recognition of matrilineal
rights of
inheritance (inheritance by a man's nephews before his
sons), and
finally, condemned the practice of bride-price.
In 1963 women reacted to the extent and direction of
government
control by forming the Association of Ivoirian Women
(Association
des Femmes Ivoiriennes--AFI). They also persuaded the
president to
establish the Ministry of Women's Affairs (Ministère de la
Condition Féminine) in 1976 and to appoint AFI leader
Jeanne
Gervais as minister. Gervais's goals were to obtain better
educational and employment opportunities for women and to
establish
judicial equality for women. Legislation was enacted in
1983 to
allow a woman to control some of her property after
marriage and to
appeal to the courts for redress of a husband's actions.
The status of women, in practice and in the law, was
still well
below that of men through most of the 1980s, but
educational
opportunities for women were improving at all levels. In
1987 about
one-sixth of the students at the National University of
Côted
d'Ivoire were women, and the number of women in the
salaried work
force had also increased. Women made up almost one-fourth
of the
civil service and held positions previously closed to
them, in
medicine, law, business, and university teaching.
Data as of November 1988
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