A
couple of weeks ago my colleagues had a discussion about lobola, and discussions like that automatically lead to a
discussion about gender roles. The general assumption is that a man pays lobola for a woman and in return she
spends the rest of her life catering to his needs. Well, that’s basically what
it boils down to. She finds herself having to cook for him, wash his clothes,
clean after him, iron his clothes and give him children while he rules the
world. But that is just what happens in the privacy of our homes. The unfortunate
thing is that these inequalities that are at home are reflected at higher
national levels. These general practices that put women at the back, ‘in the
kitchen’, are the very practices that leave women behind. Because of these
traditional practices, we still rarely see women in senior positions.
For
Swaziland as a developing country, it is important that the economy capture the
contribution of all its female citizens. By ignoring women in development, we
will cut out half the country’s contribution. The general feeling is that women
gravitate towards child rearing and things around the home, while men gravitate
toward construction projects. This kind of thinking leads to the idea that
women should remain at home and raise children because that’s what they are
especially suited for, while men must enter the work force and earn money
because that is what they are especially suited for. But that mentality is so
1800s! The most amazing thing is that some of the supporters of this mentality,
as was one of my colleagues, are women who are actually at work. The fact that
she is at work while saying this should be an indication that times have
changed, and so should our thinking.
The
other thing that people do not understand is that in this time and age, a lot
of people actually no longer fit in the boxes that were created for them before
they were even born. People just no longer fit in these supposedly ‘natural’
gender roles. I know a lot of women who feel more comfortable solving
mathematical problems than they do holding a baby. There are many families
where the man prefers cooking while the woman tends to the yard. Most, if not
all, of the cooking shows I have watched such as Master Chef and The Cake Boss
have proven this fact in that most of these top chefs are men. There are other
families where you find that the woman is the one who goes to work, while the
man stays at home, in most cases with no source of income of his own.
The
reality is that people are incredibly diverse, for every ‘natural’ woman there
is a woman who finds the idea of having children foreign and frightening. For
every man who loves fixing things there is a man who prefers taking his car to
a shop or calling a plumber. I know too many people, both men and women, who do
not fit into these ‘natural’ gender roles that it begins to make the idea of
natural gender roles seem absurd and restrictive. The reality is that such
mentality pushes people into specific boxes, whether they want to be there or
not. The other reality is that it creates hypocrites out of us. To hear a woman
who wakes up every morning and bands over backwards taking care of her family,
speak so strongly in favour of gender roles or hearing an unemployed man tell a
woman ‘she belongs in the kitchen’ is very problematic and hypocritical. And
that, frankly, is why I have a problem with these gender roles and boxes that
society is panel beating women into.
