In Praise of Hard Working Women

By Adeleke Adeeko

About a week after the passing of Dorcas Abosede Adeeko (nee Oresanya), my mother and of three other middle aged men, at the age of 83, one of my younger brothers brought to my house in Ijebu Imusin a Ghana-Must-Go-Bag of her belongings. The bag was kept in the room she occupied during the few days she lived in the house. I went through the contents and cried. My crying was not for my loss. It was not because I would never meet my mother in that room again. I cried because of what the contents of that bag disclosed: the unkindness of life towards women of her age who worked all their lives.

Mother worked hard all her adult life. She worked hard, I repeat. In the 1960s, she combined sewing and trading at her IIjebu-Musin market stall, and towards the end of that decade, she turned to fish retail completely. Between Imusin market every fifth day, she would ply her trade to surrounding communities barefooted, from Ishewo to Igan, from Ikala to Ilagunjo; it did not matter whether it rained buckets, or the sun-heated soil scorched the sole. By the 1970s, she added runs to Fugbada and Ijebu-Ode’s Ita-Osu market. Yet,  when she passed away many decades later, peacefully, after a dinner fed her by one of her sons at his house in Lagos, on 21

December 2013, mother had no house or other landed property. She had no cars. She had no cattle or other livestock. She used to own a lean bank account at the Ijebu-Imushin Community Bank. Indeed, the only social security she had in her final years was the attention of her sons and daughters-in-law.

The Ghana-Must-Go-Bag led me to wonder what would have been her lot in old age had she no children in a position to take care of her challenging health and material needs. I reflected on the condition of old women all over the country who worked hard and are never able to earn enough to set aside enough for old age. The iconic bag made me wonder why most landed property is owned by males despite the relentless hard work of women that Nigerian high academic scholarship, including some produced by this writer, celebrates incessantly. That Ghana-Mus-Go-Bag led me to want to know what happened to all the farmlands that used to belong to the family from which my mother came. I wondered about the potential economic disadvantage that the cultural practice of making women move into their husband’s homestead has perpetrated, and still perpetrates, against women everywhere.

Would things have been different had mom stayed among her father’s people, I asked myself. That bag caused me to look closer at the condition of my four female half siblings, two of whom had died in their 50s. I noticed a disturbing pattern; while my male siblings (three full and three half) and I are not wealthy, we have all fared better than our sisters. Meanwhile, we were all raised by the same parents in the same household, and half of my male siblings are no better educated than any of my sisters. Yet, there is already a noticeable disparity in our statuses will all all the males owning the roofs over their heads while not one of our sisters does!

It seems that unknown to us, our sisters’s march into the middle class is not advancing, and they are replicating our mothers’ lives. The patrilocality which I suggested above as a possible cause of my mother’s situation does not apply to my sisters. My father educated all his daughters and ensured that the only landed property he left behind when he died in 2,000 was equitably shared without regard to gender or sex. These events suggest to me that something systemic is holding back the advancement of women from families that are struggling to produce first generation middle class offsprings in Nigeria.

On further reflection, I concluded tentatively that trade streaming, far more than culture, is the main setback for women striving to move up into the middle class for the first time. What if my mother had learned carpentry (like my father) and not garment making when she finished elementary schooling in 1948? Had she done so, wouldn’t she have had a more rewarding wage earning and/or self-employed means of income? After all, no person, male or female, could have become rich in our home town by relying exclusively on income from sewing clothes because most people invested in new attires only at special moments which, for most, occur two or three festivities every couple of years. Carpenters, however, did better because they could sell their skills all over like my father did up and down Nigeria.

I ask myself whether my sister who passed away at the age of 56 nearly a decade ago would have been better off materially had my father taught her carpentry or encouraged her to learn plumbing or HVAC, or masonry or one of the other allegedly manly trades. (A lot of the men my father trained are doing well in the trade, I should note.) Would my struggling female cousins have been able to throw away their no-good spouses had they been truck drivers and not poorly paid private school teachers and petty traders?

While I am not able to answer these questions positively, my trained gumption nudges me to believe that my natal society has to resolve to address the feminization of poverty by freeing trades from gender and sex. This is not a call for governmental interventions. My appeal is to parents. Initiate your wives, daughters, and girlfriends into “men’s” trades. Encourage them to become bus drivers. Buy Okada motorcycle taxis for them. Apprentice them to butchers. Enroll them in carpentry schools. Hire tutors for them in air conditioning and ventilation systems repair. Be sure your female relatives are fully represented when land matters are being discussed. I am also asking females to cease volunteering to be the community’s “weak vessels.”

Dorcas Abosede Adeeko was a very strong woman. She worked very hard at her trades. Her families remember her steadfast dedication to them. Her sons, in particular, recollect with heavy gratitude the tenacious attention she gave to their care in spite of the daunting odds she faced. This writer recallswith fondness her gems of advice on how to prepare for life. Her admonition that we should not time our progress by other people’s schedules remains a cardinal dictum for us. Her unforgettable instructions on how to treat our spouses remain evergreen with us as well. None of us can forget her insistence that we should go to school and be well educated. We appreciated it much later in life that she was right when she hammered it into our heads that that she had nothing else for us to inherit besides the commitment to strong education. Indeed, the relentless pursuit of her children’s best interests drove her life. Because she worked so hard, her son’s move into the middle class has been far easier that it would have been. She sacrificed a good part of her well being for the nurturing of ours.

Professor Adeeko writes from the Ohio State University.

-culled from TheNEWS magazine