Female chauvinist and male patriarchs: a critical analysis of gender relations in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story

Abstract

This article examines gender relations in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story (henceforth Changes).  The novel depicts a gender crisis among the educated and career-oriented women working in government offices in Accra. The focus is on women’s education, sexuality, marriage, and marital rape. The three women protagonists, Esi, Opokuya and Fusena, find the institution of marriage challenging and hold the view that it hampers their career development. Esi is highly educated compared to the other female characters. She is a female chauvinist, who feels too powerful to be controlled by a man. She finds herself in the most complicated situation in her marriage, because of her feminist views, which she acquired from Western education. Although she abhors the dominance of men over women, her sexuality naturally brings her into relationships with male patriarchs. Her views about love and marriage are superficial and irreconcilable with the realities of her society. She divorces her first husband because of marital rape and goes into a polygamous marriage, which she also finds unfulfilling. In this article, I argue that Esi’s problems in her first marriage are due to her uncompromising character and her inability to engage her husband in order to strike a balance between family obligations and career goals. In addition, I argue that Esi does not realise her expectations in the second marriage because she emotionally and selfishly goes into it without understanding the rules that govern polygamous marriages.