Women in Ivory Coast ethnic background and historical circumstance. It has been argued that Ivorian cultures largely had a cultural bias against equality between the sexes, embodied in customary law and codified in the colonial period. But this view has been challenged by Ivorian writers, who argue that in many pre-colonial societies, women held political and /or economic power equal to many men. Looking specifically at the "N'Gongbo" Baoulé people, one writer contrasts Ivorian women's roles the traditional Western tradition where the public and the private spheres are separated, with the superior public sphere reserved for men, and argues that Western intellectuals transpose this
Woman in Chains the impetus for the lyric to "Melody Maker": "I was reading some feminist literature at the time and I discovered that there are societies in the world still in existence today that are non-patriarchal. They don't have the man at the top and the women at the bottom. They're matricentric — they have the woman at the centre and these societies are a lot less violent, a lot less greedy and there's generally less animosity... but the song is also about how men traditionally play down the feminine side of their characters and how both men and women suffer for