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Many African societies are patriarchal, based on the supremacy of the male over the female. According to Mba (2009, p.322), “emancipation of females is one of the greatest achievements of the women’s struggle globally”. As a continent, African culture accords a superior status to the male such that strength, freedom, independence, honour, courage and other positive attributes are ascribed to the male gender, while attributes of weakness, fear, dependence among others are ascribed to the female gender. Crimes of less magnitude are considered as “female” crimes and attract less stiff punishment. The killing of Ezeudu’s first son by Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for example, is described as a female crime. On the nature of the crime, Achebe writes “the crime was of two kinds, male and female, Okonkwo committed the female because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after some years” (p.87). In this paper, the Feminist theory is used to examine the portraiture of females in two short stories by two African female writers. In this article, the family is categorise as a fundamental part of the social life of Africans, it attempts to expose the bias of African culture against the female in favour of the male, and consider how this social reality impacts negatively on the female psyche. The stories reveal that women themselves aggravate the situation by working against themselves. We conclude that female empowerment is a must for all females, and that just as governments are projecting education for all by the year 2020, the women’s movement should also target education for all females by the year 2020, because as the stories reveal, the educated female character fares better in the society than her less literate counterpart.

This paper used the Discursive Approach to Language and Gender studies to examine all-female linguistic choices and how linguistic variation amongst female interlocutors is a representation of each female's individual and cultural identity and feminist ideology. The study revealed that linguistic variability abounds between individual women as well as amongst women as a social group and further showed that each IJAH 5(2), S/NO 17, APRIL, 2016 182 Copyright © IAARR 2016 www.ajol.info individual woman's talk-style reflects her linguistic idiolect and translates to her individual feminist ideology. The study also showed that the interactional style of Black American women and the use of their peculiar Black vernacular English called Ebonics identify them as a separate socio-cultural group with a separate feminist ideology different from that of their white counterparts. The study concluded that individual women's linguistic choices and socio-cultural background militates against a universal feminist ideology but rather makes feminism multicultural / pluralist in theory and practice.

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