IWD2014: Inspirational Women, May You Continue To Shine

Her father never sent her to school. She was seventeen years old when her uncle taught her how to read and write, and basic sums. Married at the age of nineteen. Husband went away to do a military service shortly after; couldn’t even get leave from the Army when their first child was born. She lived with her husband’s family, and was told that her brother-in-law was a “master of the house” and should be obeyed as such. Brother in law read her husband’s letters before she did. Having done the required military service, husband found a job in a big city. She and the child joined him.

She worked in a factory and looked after their two-room-with-a-shared-toilet household. In her spare time, she was helping her husband to build a house, brick by brick. Countless hours spent operating a cement mixer. Digging, lifting, shifting, installing. Their daughter played in the sand, with broken pieces of bricks or wood. They drank filtered rain water from the cistern once they moved into the new house, and the toilet was outside for a little while, but they were no longer renting.

She never learned to drive, because her husband said “you can never trust male driving instructors”. On International Women’s Day, the factory they both worked in usually organised a day out for the women comrades. Her husband said he wouldn’t be happy if she went, as he wouldn’t be around. So she didn’t go. On the day, her daughter would proudly hand her the violets she’d pick from the nearby meadow.

She’d never miss an International Women’s Day themed play in her daughter’s school. To watch her little girl dance and sing was a delight, and filled her with pride. Her daughter went on to have two degrees, and a driving licence.

Both women were accomplished in their own right, and were products of different times: not-so-distant past dominated by men, and the present, in which women sometimes look down on many women of their mother’s generation, telling them they were “not free”. So much potential wasted, so many lives spent in a form of subjugation. Maybe. But that’s the way things were, not so long ago, and for some women around the world, in more or less subtle ways, this is still a reality.

Will mark this International Women’s  Day by going to see “Philomena”, a movie about a woman’s search for her son whom she was forced to give up for an adoption as she had him out of the wedlock. Thinking about all the wonderful and inspirational women I met in my life – may you continue to shine.

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Follow Jasminka on Twitter @JasminkaGriffin and visit her blog, which is not written in English, Rijecankaudublinu.com.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers