Motherhood in Malagasy Society: A Major Component in the Tradition vs. Modernity Conflict

Abstract

It has emerged on many different occasions that many Malagasy women, particularly the educated ones, believe that modernity is synonymous with emancipation of women. This would imply that in traditional Malagasy society, women were not emancipated. The assumption would fall in with the views of feminists in Europe and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, when the theory was that though matriarchy had existed at the dawn of humanity, it was very soon superseded by patriarchal systems which were still more or less ruthlessly enforced at the expense of women, depending on the degree of 'civilization' (in European terms) of any given society. The idea that the less 'civilized' a nation (i.e. non- Christian), the lower women's status in it, was also shared by some Christian missionaries. And at Independence, the Malagasy, Western-educated men who had just taken over from the French colonial administration thought it their sacred duty to bring 'modernity', that is Western ways and values, into their country.