At the time that "The Green Leaves" was published in the early 1960s, not many published African writers were women despite the growing international reputations of African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. The dearth of women writers in Africa has been ascribed to the lack of opportunities for women to be educated during the colonial periods as well as women's traditional roles that often placed them in the home as mothers and homemakers. However others have argued, particularly African women writers and critics, that women writers have been overlooked because they are unworthy of publication and critical study. In her 1987 article in Women in African Literature Today, "Feminist Issues in the Fiction of Kenya's Women Writers," Jean F. O' Barr claims that "No major anthologies of African literature include selections of works by female writers and the few that are organized by topic...