CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The education of women has been recognized for several decades as a fundamental human right and a development necessity. Education not only provide basic knowledge and skills to improve health and livelihood, but it empowers women to take their rightful place in society and development process. Education gives women the status and confidence to influence household decisions. Educating women is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. In the Nigerian society between the early 1970s and early 1980s experienced growth in terms of social, economic and educational development. This brought about increased movement away from the traditional way of life due to industrialization, education, influence of electronic media and the exposure to foreign cultures. In the traditional setting, the Nigerian woman was brought up right from youth in ways which will get her ready for marriage and make her settle down to a successful marriage. She was taught the different roles she would play as a woman, in terms of home making, motherhood, having good relationship with her husband and in-law. She was taught the art of patience and submissiveness towards her husband in order to be able to play these roles successfully. Traditionally, parents were satisfied with a female child playing only the role of a wife and a mother as stipulated by the Nigeria culture. Today parents have realized that their female children attain positions of honor in the society and marry men of high social standing.

They have seen education and exposure to other cultures as a means of achieving these objectives. At a very early age, the Nigerian female child is sent to school where at the very beginning she is placed in the same compound with them for class grades and marks. She learns to see the male as her equals as they do not seem to possess more intelligence than herself. The Nigerian female child is exposed to Western cultures having values that are quite different from those of the Africa and hence, the Nigerian woman is gradually sluing from the patience and submissive person she used to be, who was ready to restrict her life to the narrow boarders of the environment in which she had been born and bred to a more pushful person, competing with men in terms of educational attainment and positions in the world of work. In the Nigeria society, if a woman has obtained a particular age and educational standard and is not yet married, she is frowned at by society and seen as a frustrated and unfulfilled person. It is therefore not usual for Nigerian parents to be overly anxious over seeing that their children are married and success at marriage. Due to this anxiety, some parents go to the extent of arranging meetings between their daughters and members of the opposite sex and eventually match-making them into marriage.

In order to make the marriage of their children successful, parents a times who are well to do, provide facilities for the young couple to make them comfortable in their new home, they also make it mandatory to enquire from time to time about the problems that could be arising from the marriage with a view to helping in solving such problems. The role of the man in the Nigerian culture is that of the master and controller of home. He wants to maintain this role all the time and does not want a situation that will militate against it lest society sees him as a weakling. Some men are weary of marrying women who have acquired higher education. Men in this group will contend that it will be easier for them to be able to have control over women who do not have more than a school certificate education or those who do not attend school at all, regardless of their own educational background. This is with the believe that such will not see them as equals and as such give them enough respect and thereby enabling them plat their roles as expected by the culture as the master of the home. The man may soon realized that he requires for a successful marriage is not supremacy band absolute submissiveness by the wife. A graduate marrying a primary school certificate holder, will soon realize that their varying social status could create a gap between himself and the wife especially were related to other people belonging to their varying social groups with varying societal values that cannot match. This would be a source of conflict and possible failure of their marriage. It may be assumed that such gap could be bridged by time when the couple must have grown to understand themselves better with time. A woman with primary school certificate who did not bother to know how to relate to people in her graduate husbands’ social class will with time learn more about her husband and what is expected of her in her marriage if she has to succeed, and this also applies to the man.