Abstract

This paper examines the social status of women in pre-colonial Benin. Two main positions exist on this. One argues that women were unfree and had limited rights in marriages, land, inheritance and other aspects of life in the society. The second position is that women were free and had privileges in the society. The paper argues that the usage of free and unfree in precolonial Benin does not apply because these terminologies and the perspectives they are understood from is technically different. This is in the sense that women in Benin had certain rights and privileges that portrayed the idea of freedom in some aspects they were restricted based on the social laws and customs which have been described as unfree. The author relied solely on secondary sources for data collection, in addition to his personal knowledge about the pre-colonial Benin society