Pains Of Womanhood – Funke Egbemode

When you take a look at your daughter(s), what do you feel? Love, pride, plenty of affection, yes.

All normal. As each day breaks and she grows from that little thing the nurses handed you after a long hard labour, to a petite girl, small adult (like my friend would say) and a young woman, do you feel apprehensive? What’s there to be apprehensive about?

Plenty. Maybe it’s only me who is anxious.

But each time I look at my daughter’s innocent eyes and she smiles those smiles full of love and trust, my heart can’t help but thud at the status of women in this society. Here is a little girl, all adorable and lovely but going into a world that is harsh on women.

You see the number of men who strip you naked with their eyes daily and fear for your girl, you think of all the indignities she might have to endure because she’s a female and you wonder what our claim to sophistication is all about.

Unlike our sons, our daughters are coming into a society where they have to scream to be heard and run like hell to catch up with anything. They would have to work extra hard to attain anything or be recognized.

Such is the sad society that refuses to accommodate women the way they should.

Right from the start, it’s a girl who should stay in the kitchen with mummy while ‘Junior’ learns about how the remote control works with the TV and VCR. She’s the one to help mummy set the table while daddy and son busy themselves doing nothing anyone can see. Oh well, they argue about computer games and football game fixtures and Mikel Obi, etc.

While your little girl is graduating from washing her panties to dresses, Junior’s CV only reads “holding the hose to wash daddy’s car.”

And when it’s time to choose a career, the girl’s should finish the dishes and the boys’ their law school. Who said women can’t be doctors and the men nurses?

Tell me who decreed that it is men who should be managing directors and the women their personal assistants. In the work place, the story gets worse.

The personnel manager feels sorry for the young woman sitting in front of him because she read mechanical engineering “i mean, she could have just read chemistry and go to teach so she could have time for her family” Tufia.

As if men don’t have families along with their careers. It’s all right for men to be geologists, but how many oil companies want a woman on the rig. “why, she’s ask for maternity leave and time to take her kids for immunization.”

Pray, educate me on how more men would come into being if we stop going on maternity leave. When an unmarried young woman is discussing salary with her would-be employers and she’s talking in six-figures, official car and residence, the recruiting panel feels scandalized. What does she need so much money for? What indeed!

So, it’s only men who should be seen behind the wheels of Excalade and Range Rover Sports, ehn?

No way, my daughter is going to drive a big car. And when she comes home in tears because the big boss say’s unless she ‘plays ball,’ she’d remain on the same salary scale for all time, what do you tell her?” it’s always like that. I went through that too. You ‘ll get used to it. Too bad but that’s the society we live in. True, there are more female doctors and pharmacists etc, but ask yourself at what expense?

Because a woman’s place is at home (no matter her qualification), even if she has a career, there are steps too bold for her to take. Her husband can apply for a UNICEF job and go abroad for two years while everybody (except me) would think she’s gone crazy to do the same. Who ‘ll take care of the kids?

What if her husband impregnates the maid or marries a second wife while she’s gone? Rubbish, arrant nonsense and crude selfishness, all that.

If the world won’t tumble if he goes on one-year fellowship abroad, it shouldn’t if she does the same. It’s all right to be a man and be single at 40 but if an unmarried woman of 35 gets angry because a careless driver crashed into her car, ‘she’s making so much noise because she’s frustrated.’

She can’t even protest an arbitrary rent hike without her landlord sneering ‘better go and marry’ as if her world must come to a stand still because she’d single. When a couple marries and after a year, there is no baby to show the in-laws, it’s because the woman is barren. Thank God, we now know there are barren men too.

Men who do unproductive performance. I don’t know about you but I say all these are worth getting mad about.

We celebrate the International Women’s Day and I think we should take stock and make our anger felt like, Lisa Jones said in Bulletproof Diva: “Who else, after all, has a stake in our visibility, our power and representation but ourselves and those children we are raising?”

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