A House with Two Rooms - The Advocates for Human Rights

male ego.” 393 This interviewee noted that he himself had been ashamed to take work in a factory or a
nursing home when he first came to America because his family had been well-off in Liberia. “They
have more opportunities for women here than for men. The notion that husbands have to be bread
winner and the inflexibility associated with that has forced them to keep looking for jobs that are
comparable to that in Liberia instead of taking lesser job and working their way up.” 394 One Liberian
community leader saw this gender role reversal as a particular issue with younger women of child
bearing age.
Well, what I see happening in the community…a lot of women are in control
and the men are not in favor of that, but they just, they just go with it. And
what I see happening more and more…the women have been left alone to
raise their children because most men, especially African men, they were
raised to be head of the household, and if they’re not, I’ve seen a lot of them
just leaving, leaving thinking they leave and go to the next person it’s going
to be different…So I see more and more women and girls having babies by
these men thinking that he will be there to help them raise these children.
And it’s not happening. And so therefore most of these women are taking
control…going to school, getting their education and raising their children,
pretty much by themselves. 395
Another community leader found a similar issue among older women in the Liberian community. She
described a female client who sought literacy and functional skills training:
We’re all working together with this lady, she’s coming to the literacy
class and we’re working with her to learn how to catch the bus…And I
just never understood, the lady couldn’t understand, why her husband was
so resistant to his wife learning anything to become independent. He just
fought everything we did. So I think at the end we just realized that it was
more about control…she has always looked up to him, for everything. She
didn’t know how to read and write, she didn’t know anything. She was there
and he was a knight in shining armor, a hero. Now all of the sudden there is
this opportunity for her to learn to read, to catch the bus, she’s going to go
to work, she’s going to be independent, and he just fought against it…And
every time she had to come to school, he found an excuse, he didn’t want her
there. So we just drew a conclusion that he was very controlling. There is a
lot of this, where men are having a hard time adjusting to the women being
independent and having financial independence. 396
According to the interviewee, the struggle to accept Liberian women’s independence has at times
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Chapter Thirteen