Across generations, women have been taught that a “good woman” knows her place, that patience is a woman’s crown, and that endurance is the true mark of virtue. These lessons, passed down lovingly from mothers to daughters, were never meant to wound. They were meant to prepare, to protect women in a world that has always demanded their quiet submission. Yet these same lessons have become invisible chains, binding women to systems that depend on their compliance to survive.
Patriarchy, contrary to popular belief, is not sustained by men alone. It is reinforced every day through the actions, choices, and teachings of women, mothers, wives, teachers, and community leaders, who have been conditioned to see subservience as righteousness and domination as order. This conditioning is not innate; it is learned, rehearsed, and deeply internalised through what I call colonial social conditioning.
Before colonial contact, Yoruba gender relations were guided by complementarity rather than hierarchy. Social roles were distributed by seniority and capability, not by biological sex. But colonial governance, Christian missionary education, and Victorian morality introduced a rigid gender binary that privileged men and confined women to domestic spaces. Over time, these imported hierarchies became naturalised through everyday life, embedded in school lessons, church sermons, and family advice. In trying to adapt, women themselves became the primary carriers of these colonial ideals, ensuring that new generations inherited not just culture, but the consciousness of subordination.
Consider how early this conditioning begins. Girls are taught to cross their legs, to lower their voices, to serve their brothers first. In school, they are praised for obedience, not curiosity. In churches, they are told that submission is divine. By adolescence, many have learned that to be accepted, they must shrink. When these girls become mothers, they repeat the same lessons, believing it is love. The cycle continues, unchallenged because it wears the familiar face of tradition.
In my ongoing research on Nigerian womanhood, I found that this internalised patriarchy is often maintained most fiercely by those who have suffered under it. A woman who endured silence in her marriage may advise her daughter to do the same. A female employer may hesitate to promote another woman, fearing it will disrupt male expectations. Even among educated women, patriarchal loyalty manifests subtly, in self-doubt, in guilt for ambition, in the reflex to apologise for success. These are not just personal flaws; they are the social symptoms of colonial conditioning.
The tragedy of this pattern is not only that women participate in their own containment, but that they do so believing they are upholding morality, modesty, or “our culture.” Many of the proverbs that shape womanhood in Nigeria, “A woman’s glory is in her husband”, “A quiet woman builds her home”, were once tools of survival in an oppressive order. Today, they are still repeated as wisdom, long after the conditions that produced them have changed.
But there is hope in awareness. Recognising social conditioning is the first step toward feminist reconditioning, a process of deliberate unlearning. This does not mean rejecting all aspects of culture; rather, it means reclaiming those indigenous values that predate colonial distortion. In Yoruba society, womanhood was once associated with strength, intellect, and spiritual authority. Women served as chiefs, traders, priestesses, and advisers. The goal, therefore, is not to erase culture but to recover its egalitarian essence; Yoruba indigenous complementarity.
Feminist reconditioning begins in small, conscious acts. It is the mother who teaches her daughter that her voice is not rebellion but expression. It is the teacher who encourages girls to lead, to question, to imagine. It is the woman who stops apologising for wanting more. And it is the community that learns to value both care and autonomy as shared human responsibilities, not gendered duties.
If patriarchy survives through repetition, then liberation must also be rehearsed, every day, in every home, by every woman who chooses to see differently. We must stop mistaking endurance for strength and silence for peace. We must stop guarding the gates of our own exclusion.
It is time to understand that the fight against patriarchy is not only external. It begins in the mind, in the private scripts we inherited and continue to perform. As women, we cannot dismantle a system we unconsciously protect. The power to unlearn is the power to begin again, to teach our daughters that womanhood is not obedience, but agency; not sacrifice, but choice.
When women stop guarding the gates, the walls will fall.
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Tolulope Victoria Adebileje is a researcher and educator whose work explores colonial social conditioning, internalised patriarchy, and feminist reconditioning in Nigerian womanhood.