Religion provided other forms of enormous prestige and authority for biological women. The senior woman of a patrilineage was revered; her status was greater than that of the senior man, and her word carried greater authority. The senior woman of a patrilineage branch, within her own branch, was likewise revered, although in terms of the whole patrilineage her position was of lesser importance than that of senior women of more senior branches. Such women carried a semi-sacred aura, as, to some extent, did all elderly women and men. Beyond purely age and seniority—both ascribed characteristics—was the possibility of achieving another form of status. Wealthy women, whose exceptional ability to acquire wealth proved that the goddess had chosen them, would pay the costs of taking on the title of ekwe. In some parts of Igboland, these titled women functioned as the community’s final court of justice and law enforcement.46 The most senior ekwe of a village-group, the agba ekwe, held “the most central political position” in the village-group, with vetoing rights in village and village-group assemblies.47 She was second in rank only to the local goddess, and while there were also titles that men could take, and some gained such widespread influence that they were called eze—king-like—they could be challenged, be questioned, even lose status. This could not happen to the agba ekwe.48
Anthropologists call this whole system, in which men and women had parallel positions and powers within their own sex, a dual-sex system.49 Each sex had its areas of authority in relation to the village as a whole, and each had its own internal systems of organization. For men, the age-grade system was critical. Men went through life in cohorts, each cohort with its own leadership, and cohorts took on a succession of different responsibilities as they aged. Aged men who also were talented as informal leaders and in their own economic endeavors carried the greatest authority in the general village meetings.50 Additionally, men could raise their status through the acquisition of wealth and of titles.
So far, we have been talking about men and women in the roles assigned to them, or available to them, as members of their biological sex. In that system, in daily life, men probably did have somewhat greater power and access to wealth than women did. Husbands had somewhat more power than wives. Only men could perform in masquerade as spirits who patrolled the village and brought people to judgment before the village council. It was men who received most of the bridewealth when a daughter married. Men of the patrilineage and its branches controlled land and houses; men controlled the crops (yams and palm oil) that produced the greatest profits and status. Women, farming a husband’s land, did largely control the crops they grew, but more of their crops went to feed their families, and when sold they didn’t bring in as much, so routes to prestige for women through wealth were a bit more difficult to traverse than they were for men.51
However, this isn’t the end of the story. Women could sometimes become men and as men take positions of authority, controlling land or people, or both.52 That they were not biological men did continue to matter, however. They were not “full men”; like many biological men, they were only regular men—men who had not been successful enough to acquire the right to perform as a supernatural in masquerade. They could not, through mask, costume, and dance, perform as a spirit.53 Despite that restriction, a woman could become a husband; she could marry a wife in what anthropologists call woman-woman marriage and become a female husband. The women who became female husbands were especially likely to be wealthy and without children from their own marriage, and thus in need of heirs, but this choice was available to any woman with ambition and the resources to pay bridewealth. Readers who are steeped in American culture might assume this describes a lesbian relationship, but woman-woman marriage had nothing to do with sex between the two women. Instead it had to do with gaining a workforce and children for the female husband—and thus access to status, wealth, perhaps ekwe titles, and heirs.
Perhaps Venis was the daughter of a woman married to a female husband. Probably she wasn’t, since more women were married to men than to women, but let’s just suppose for a moment. Her “father,” not the sperm donor, but the person who paid the bridewealth that validated her mother’s marriage and who fulfilled the responsibilities of a father toward her, would be the female husband. By paying bridewealth, the female husband laid claim to the children born to the wife, in the same way that any man did in paying bridewealth. Some anthropologists say that bridewealth isn’t really about claiming a wife. Instead, it is about claiming the children the wife has, regardless of who the biological father might be. Perhaps a way to think of it is that the husband is laying claim to the fruits of her womb, not necessarily to sole insemination rights. Among the Igbo and many other societies, in a divorce, the woman’s family returned the bridewealth, and the husband had no claim on later children.54
Let me add that for the Igbo at least (for there were numerous African and Native American societies that legitimized some version of woman-woman marriage) adultery in any marriage was a serious offense against the gods.55 A wife in a woman-woman marriage, however, was expected to produce children for her female husband, and thus did—discreetly—have sex with a lover who at least sometimes was acknowledged by the female husband, while sex with anyone else would be considered adultery. In any case the lover would never be able to lay claim to the children. He had not paid the bridewealth, so they were not his children. Alternatively, a wealthy woman could also formally marry a wife “for her brother” or even for a slave or former slave. She paid the bridewealth, the woman acted as a wife for the man, perhaps one of his many wives, but the children belonged to the woman who had paid bridewealth. She was their father. A woman could also become a man if her father formally declared she was a man, making her a male daughter. Men without sons might take this step in order to have an heir, so that the lineage branch did not die out. In this case, the male daughter would not marry, but might have children, or might marry a woman. In either case, the lineage would carry on through her, so the land would not revert to the patrilineage.56
As male daughters or as female husbands, women gained authority over people and labor. Getting the wealth together to provide bride-wealth for a marriage would be more difficult for a woman than for a man. But if she succeeded, she had made an investment that could be expected to pay off. She would have increased her labor force with a wife, enabling her to accumulate wealth. So having a wife enhanced her ability to handle the enormous costs of the feasting and gifting entailed in taking on a title that would raise her status. As men, such women participated in village councils with authority equal to that of a biological man. They could take male titles, expect service and respect within family and lineage as a man, and have a public house in the compound surrounded by the houses of their wives and perhaps sons.
Although there is a great deal of literature supporting this description of the role of female men, one authority, Ugo Nwokeji, maintains that becoming male in this way was not part of Igbo culture in the 1700s, and thus Venis would have known nothing of this kind of gender flexibility. Instead, Nwokeji says,