Marriage Systems and the Roles of Women in Offa, Kwara State, Nigeria

Marriage contract is a social institution that is of great importance among people all over the world. Yoruba traditional marriage system is in a state of continuous change due to influence of foreign ideas on the peoples culture and tradition with improvement in the quality of life of the people. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of women in the community towards social, economic and political development are the same regardless of their religion and form of marriage. It is in view of the foregoing that the study examined the marriage systems and the roles of women in Offa, Kwara State within the frame work of development efforts. A simple random sampling technique was used to select 100 married women in the study area. Data was collected using a validated and pretested interview schedule and data collected was analysed using means, frequencies, percentages and chi- square. Findings from the study showed that 28 percent of the respondents were above 45 years of age with a mean age of 48 years. The study showed that the husbands of 20 percent of them made farming decisions for them while 18 percent of them made farming decisions on their own. The roles of the women included children training/development, house cleaning, washing, cooking, fetching water, collection of firewood for the family and family decision making. About 76 percent of them were involved in community development project activities. The result from the study revealed that there was no significant relationship between cooking (X2= 0.758, P≤0.05), decision making (X2=0.284, P ≤0.05) and level of education of the women. It is therefore recommended in view of the contributions made by women towards the nation’s political, social, economic and cultural development that special women’s developmental programmes should be set up in the country and traditional institutions should be modernized while new institutions should be traditionalized in order to bring the desired change into reality.