Running the Female Power Grid Across Lifespan Through Brain Estrogen Signaling

The role of central estrogen in cognitive, metabolic, and reproductive health has long fascinated the lay public and scientists alike. In the last two decades, insight into estrogen signaling in the brain and its impact on female physiology is beginning to catch up with the vast information already established for its actions on peripheral tissues. Using newer methods to manipulate estrogen signaling in hormone-sensitive brain regions, neuroscientists are now identifying the molecular pathways and neuronal subtypes required to establish crucial sex differences in energy allocation. However, the immense cellular complexity of these hormone-sensitive brain regions makes it clear that more research is needed to fully appreciate how estrogen modulates neural circuits to regulate physiological and behavioral end points. Such insight is essential for understanding how natural or drug-induced hormone fluctuations across lifespan affect women's health. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Physiology, Volume 84 is February 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Chinweizu’s Assumptions of Women’s Power in Anatomy of Female Power: A Critique

Culturally speaking, the African woman is saddled with onerous responsibilities that perpetually put her at a disadvantage over her male counterpart. Ranging from the kitchen to child bearing, care giving and child rearing to the farm and market and many more, the African woman spends her life playing the motherly role with its numerous sacrifices attached. Meanwhile, she is acquired by her man through the customary “bride price” to become a wife, and more so, she is disregarded by society if she does not have children. When she is not educated, or she gets impregnated and drops out of school, she assumes the status of a house wife and child-breeder, while her male counterpart continues his education. Most women depend on their husbands for financial support and also some go the extra mile to assume the responsibility of breadwinning when their husbands are faced with financial challenges. Nevertheless, a woman’s educational training is a potent weapon for her liberation. Against this background, this study critically assesses Chinweizu’s assumptions of female power in Anatomy of Female Power in the context of prevalent cultural practices to ascertain the true position of today’s African woman viś-a-viś existing patriarchal hegemony in the Nigerian society. To this end, Feminist Theory serves as the theoretical framework for this discourse. This article examines the kinds or nature of female power that exists through Chinweizu’s evaluation of women’s role in their marital home which could transcend into political and cultural powers when harnessed. This study concludes by stating that women’s perceived powers are natural roles due to their biology which may not indeed be considered as powers however, if given favourable conditions, they can become a potent force in exercising female leadership in society.

Chinweizu and Woman’s Place: A Response to Anatomy of Female Power

This article examines the reality or illusion of the perceived ‘paradises’ of ‘female power’, the purported façade of patriarchy and the claimed pervasiveness of matriarchy in Chinweizu’s Anatomy of Female Power. By deconstructing the extreme essentialist perspectives of AFP, and in line with womanism, the article interrogates the perceived covert matriarchal power sites of the masculinist creation and argues that they essentialize woman’s place in fixed biologically defined gender spaces, hence negating the concept of societal power as exercised rather than possessed. These placements, while trivializing woman’s role in the public sphere, obviously obfuscate the acknowledged dual-sex political system in some African and Nigerian settings. Responding from the generally African and specifically Igbo experience, the work offers an alternative womanist conceptualization, beyond matriarchy-patriarchy and other gender stereotypic binaries; a humanistic form of gender fluidity where the synergy of the two genders will engender complementarity, collaboration, compromise and cooperation.

A FEMINIST READING OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, introduces the world to the tribulations of the enslaved African Americans. While as a woman writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe also pays close attention to female power and consciousness apart from the abolitionism in her work. Through the analysis of women’s domesticity and women’s strength in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this paper attempts to fathom into Stowe’s feminist ideas manifested in this book, therefore colors the understanding of this literary canon.