아프리카ㆍ중동

Traditional views on women in relation to men in almost all aspects of life have always been in favour of the male gender across cultures. In deed women and the girl child have been subjected to all forms of discriminations, exclusions and segregations from birth to old age. This phenomenon has been a challenge to many scholars, government and International Agencies the world over. Efforts have therefore been made to address the negative effects of male dominance in all sphere of life to the detriment of women. This paper is yet another attempt at contributing to the existing knowledge on how to tackle the challenges of gender discrimination in relation to development of humanity. The attempt here however is a departure from the usual focus on how women have been denied opportunities to contribute to development. It rather focuses on how some women have been able to remove or jump over the barriers mounted by patriarchy and patriarchal structures in a developing society. The paper examines propertied women in South West, Nigeria in relation to how they escaped from men’s domination in a male dominated society. About 195 out of 225 sample propertied women who owned landed and movable properties were selected for the study. The paper argued that the propertied women in this study area has actually experienced a remarkable change, against all odds, in their status majorly as a result of their mastery of the patriarchal structure of the study area and their own successful combination of both attitude of submission and achievement. This is what the paper termed ‘Diatude’ – a combination of cooperation and resistance mental sets that shape and influence ones feelings about something.