Performing Womanhood: Gender Negotiation and Female Agency in the West African Novel in English

What does it mean for womanhood to be performed rather than simply lived, and how does negotiation become the quiet grammar of survival in contexts shaped by gendered constraint? These questions frame the concern of this study as it examines how West African fiction reimagines female agency through acts of strategic adaptation rather than overt rebellion. The study is an exploration of the construction of womanhood in Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story. The study argues that gender in these texts is not a fixed biological essence but a socially regulated performance shaped by domestic, urban, and professional spaces. Drawing on African Womanism, nego-feminism, and snail-sense feminism, the study theorises agency as a relational and situational practice embedded within everyday negotiations of power. Using qualitative narrative inquiry and comparative thematic analysis, the study examines the novels as interconnected meditations on the shifting meanings of freedom for African women. Findings suggest that resistance in these novels is neither uniform nor absolute. In Shoneyin, women construct covert solidarities within polygamous domesticity to destabilise patriarchal control. In Atta, education and legal consciousness enable mobility while exposing the fragility of urban independence. In Aidoo, professional success unsettles marital expectations, revealing the emotional costs of autonomy. Across the texts, agency emerges as a negotiated practice rather than a final achievement. The article concludes that the “New Woman” in novels written by novelists who belong to the West African Novel in English block is best understood as an ongoing performance of survival, shaped by constant recalibration between tradition, modernity, and selfhood.