Quote 25
[Okonkwo]: “I will not have a son who cannot hold up his head in the gathering of the clan. I would sooner strangle him with my own hands.” (4.33)
Okonkwo would rather kill his son than live with an effeminate one. Basically, Okonkwo is thinking of his own reputation as a man, which he doesn’t want tarnished by a soft son.
Quote 26
Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said. “This meeting is for men.” The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit. (4.1)
Being called a woman is clearly a nasty insult as it has the ability to “kill a man’s spirit.” Obviously, women aren’t highly valued in Umuofia.
Quote 27
“He belongs to the clan,” he told her [Okonkwo’s eldest wife]. “So look after him.”
“Is he staying long with us?” she asked.
“Do what you are told, woman,” Okonkwo thundered, and stammered. “When did you become one of the ndichie of Umuofia?”
And so Nwoye’s mother took Ikemefuna to her hut and asked no more questions. (2.16-19)
Okonkwo treats his wife like a servant, demanding that she does whatever he commands her with no questions asked. Women, as demonstrated by Okonkwo’s eldest wife here, are taught to be silent and obedient. In fact, women count for so little in Igbo society that they are often not even addressed by their given names, but referred to by their relationship with men. Throughout the entire novel, the narrator rarely calls Okonkwo’s first wife by her name, she is almost always identified in relation to her husband or son, Nwoye.