ABSTRACT
The consciousness and memory of women in French West Africa is characteristically constructed from a fusion of two very different sources: one which is autochthonous, and expresses the gender concepts typical of the pre-colonial period, and another, of French origin, which was first introduced at the start of this century. These two types of memory and social consciousness have interacted to produce other gender concepts. Anthropological and sociological studies have shown how this post-colonial interaction, combined with the ambiguities of women’s actual experience, has resulted in stereotypes, values, and norms whose origins are often difficult to trace. In the context in which African women have been confronted by the Western world’s images of femininity and expected to attain some aspects of this European model, their collective and individual memories necessarily select and attempt to realize some concepts from both sources and suppress others. Both their own attitudes and their immediate sources of influence in the press and local popular opinion reflect a constantly changing world of choices and symbiosis, collisions and ruptures.
