Modernization and Global Restructuring of Women's Work

13
Scene Two: The World My Mother Gave Me
Addressing the theme of a conference, “the world my mother gave me,” Himani Bannerji (2001:2)
observes that “our mothers are/were not in a position to give us much of the world, which mostly lay
beyond their reach. Yet, they did leave us with an inheritance of a longing for the out-of-reach
world.” Women’s need to occupy a wider space of activity and movement in history, Bannerji notes,
may be achieved generationally where women are simultaneously mothers and daughters. “This does
not have to be, perhaps often is not, a conscious decision, but lived movements of and through
history, of women designing, re-writing their ‘selves,’ embodying the stories of being and becoming.”
While Nadia was preparing herself for school/outside life, she does not dismiss her mother’s
interior world of home as insignificant. She considers it as an integral part of her story of being and
becoming.
My father used to work in the refinery company and my mother was a housewife and
remained at home to take care of six children. She married my father when she was
twelve years old and my father was forty years old at the time, a big age difference.
Nadia’s pragmatic point of interjection into the popular discourse of early marriage equals
oppression is worthy of note. She observes that her mother was an orphan and as such marriage gave
her the opportunity to enter into a role-filled (wife and later a mother) relationship as opposed to
depending on her uncle for support. Within a short period of time, her mother became a widow.
I was twelve years old when my father retired and my mother insisted that we move
to another city, Quay. She insisted because she wanted to live close to her uncle who
at that time was living in Quay. We moved to Quay and after a month my father
became ill and passed away. My thirty-year-old mother was left with six young
children and some savings at the bank and monthly pension of my father. We bought
a house to live in and we had a simple condition of living. At that time I was in high
school.
Nadia expressed admiration for her mother (an illiterate woman) for taking on the
responsibility of raising six children (three sisters and three brothers) on her father’s pension. She
does not frame this event as something that her mother coped with in the absence of any other choice.
She portrays her mother as someone who took charge of the house with realistic expectations that
they were going to have “a simple condition of life.” This observation draws our attention to the fact