As related to what De Beauvoir said in her book “The Second Sex”, “The whole of female history has been, literally man-made”. I was born into an extended family in which my father lives with his brothers and their wives. My mother and her co-wives, about nine of them were full-time housewives. Therefore, they did whatever their husbands compelled them to do.
They depend on their husband for literally everything. This fits into De Beauvoir's explanation of “male supremacy in pre-history that is; women had to carry the burden of reproduction, and this made them heavily dependent on men for protection and food,” this is a typical example of my mothers who were not doing any productive work outside the home. Their role in the home was to reproduce and do domestic chores.
Relating Dr Beauvoir’s “The burdens of marriage weigh much more heavily upon women than men” the role of my father and his brothers who are the husbands of my aunties was not much compared to the effort my mother and aunties were putting in the marriage. They wake up very early to start their daily chores and retire late at night when everyone in the home has eaten and gone to bed including my father and his brothers who only go to work and come back in the evening to have freshly cooked food.
In her description of the discrimination and low status of American women before, De Beauvoir refreshed my mind when she said “how intelligent women were embarrassed or ignored when they tried to contribute to a conversation men were having”. Not only in my home but in every gathering of men, women are not given the platform to talk in my country and this is still happening especially in the rural areas.
De Beauvoir’s general view of marriage is “an institution which aim is to make the economic and sexual union of woman and man serve the interest of society, not to assure their mutual happiness”. This example perfectly relates to my home and many homes in an African setting where women are confined to the home with endless repetition of housework. On the other hand, the husband has to go out and work to keep the family sustenance. Marriage could have been very beautiful and enjoyable if society had not interfered with gender roles or when society acknowledges and recognises the tremendous contribution made by women in the keeping of the family.
“While marriage is actually a burden for women whose roles have never been acknowledged and valued for and a benefit for both partners, there is little symmetry in their respective positions”, this expression of De Beauvoir, explains why despite the hardship in marriage my mother and aunties still find pride in marriage and encourage their daughters to get married because it is a way of integrating into the society or honouring the values of the family
“In marriage, a woman acquires an appending status; as de Beauvoir explains, she becomes an appendage of her husband”, relating this to my mother's personal experience as a married woman means taking my father’s last name, making his family her immediate family and according to my mother before I was born she followed my father wherever he is posted in any part of the country because he was a civil servant; therefore, posted to various parts of the country. This means my mother was not for herself but for her husband and family, meaning her happiness comes last.
According to De Beauvoir, “nursing an infant is more tiring than pregnancy, but it enables the nursing mother to prolong the state of being on vacation in peace and plenitude, enjoyed in pregnancy”, I can relate this to my mother’s experience of child bearing and nursing, she said this is a period that enabled her to rest and look after her baby without doing any domestic chores at all but this resting period is often cut short when the baby turns one month.
I can relate to “A mother who punishes her child is not beating the child alone; in a sense, she is not beating the child at all: she is taking her vengeance on a man, on the world, or herself” as if De Beauvoir is trying to explain my childhood here. When we were very little my cousins and I would be beaten or punished for very little offense, often this would happen when my mother or my aunties have a dispute with their husbands.
Says de Beauvoir, “A mother will want to give her daughter both the opportunities she herself had and those she missed. But because of her ambivalent attitude towards her own sex, she will also seek to impose her fate on her daughter as well”, seeing myself in what De Beauvoir said here, my mother chose to give me the opportunities she missed in life such as getting educated and being independent. This made her do all she could to educate me and make me the woman I am today and who I want to be in the future. Women should be celebrated now and forever.
