The Women's Song

Laurel M. Madsen

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Helen Candland Stark Personal Essay Contest winner

Vol. 20, No. 2 (1997)

At my home in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in sweltering August, I am standing at the window looking down over mango trees and coconut palms to the men and women building the house of a rich man next door.  They have been at it many months; all the work is done with their hands using simple tools.  Part of the flat roof of the mansion is just across from my third-floor apartment, and it is there that the women labor.  Burned almost black by the tropical sun, they pour pails of water upon the clay surface, then crouch down with brooms made of branches to sweep the liquid in.  Finally, in a steady rhythm that goes on hour after hour, they use heavy, flat clubs to pound the wet clay into a packed surface.

I know where these women come from.  Next to my modern, red brick apartment house is a little community of tin-sided huts surrounded by piles of rotting garbage.  Naked children play in the street or among the garbage mounds.  Big children mind the little children while their mothers work.  If it’s early or late, I see the women there too, milking the cow, preparing the food over an open fire on the ground, nursing the babies, chasing after the toddlers.  They seem never to rest.   Fathers are away during the day working too, but at home I see them taking their leisure; it is not their place to cook or help with children.

As I watch the women at work this morning, I have in my hand a letter from the Utah Association of Women asking me to support a delegation traveling to Beijing, China, to represent family values and oppose “empowerment” of women at the Fourth World Conference on Women.  I am to send a contribution and also sign a statement to be included in the conference’s Platform for Action.  It sounds good: “When a woman in cooperation with her husband, chooses to become a mother, she shall be afforded the legal protections of marriage, which favor the financial and emotional support of her husband within the home.”  Well, I can’t quarrel with any of that, so why does the sentence jar?

As I ponder, my sisters on the roof across from me give me the answer.  And I have seen women like these in many developing countries where I have lived and traveled for twenty years.  Their lot is grinding, endless poverty.  They do not have the option of choosing motherhood in cooperation with husbands; they bear babies whether they wish to or not.  Marriage usually does not mean either financial or emotional support, and they work brutally hard both inside and outside the home to put food in the mouths of their children.  The words of the statement in the letter I hold are vastly to be desired—what a beautiful vision they hold!—but they have little reality for millions of women.

Without realizing what life for women like my neighbors on the roof is like, the writers of my letter attack the idea of empowerment for them as encouragement to abandon motherhood and the concept of family.  I could laugh at the notion that helping women to have a little control of their lives would cause them to abandon their children, but rather I feel like weeping that prosperous, protected Utah women oppose a better life for their less fortunate sisters across the world.  I read the list of supporting sentences for the proposed platform statement, and each one pierces my heart.

A woman’s decision to become a mother is perhaps the most important choice a woman will make, and many women find lasting happiness in their role as mother.

Whenever I walk in Dhaka, in my own neighborhood or downtown market, women approach me asking for money.  They carry nursing babies at their breasts, and naked children pull at their skirts.  They gesture toward their mouths and the mouths of their children.  They are hungry.  In Bangladesh, one-fourth of the children die before the age of five.

When I live in El Salvador, Central America, I watch my toddler son, with thumb in mouth, approach a brown, naked child.  Both small boys have round bellies, but my son’s fat tummy matches his plump cheeks and arms and legs.  The other boy’s abdomen is very large, but his limbs and face are thin.  So, too, is his mother terribly thin, though she is pregnant.  She gazes intently at the children, her expression unreadable.  What must it be like, I wonder in anguish, to have babies and not have enough food to feed them?

A woman’s decision to become a mother should be made in cooperation with her husband.

In Guatemala, I meet the weary eyes of an Indian mother as we ride in a boat crossing Lake Atitlan.  She is nursing a baby, an older infant is nestled in the tattered shawl she wears across her back, and two tiny ragged children clutch at her skirts.  She is very thin and very tired; she must be young, but her face is old.  The husband sits apart, proud and severe.  Her look into my eyes seems to ask for help—but I don’t know what to do.

I read a book by a young American woman who spends a year with her husband in a Bangladeshi village.  Making sure that their husbands do not see them, on by one the women approach the American to ask if she can teach them how not to have another baby.  For most of the women, pregnancies occur each year, and there is already not enough to eat.

When a child is born within the bond of marriage the father is bound to the child as legally as the mother—with a long-term commitment.

Tahira is my Bangladeshi cook.  She is only twenty-eight years old but has already lost her first child by her husband’s decision to have their daughter raised by his relatives.  She is the sole support of her second child, a three-year-old boy.  Her husband has taken a second wife and gone to live with her; he no longer contributes any help to Tahira and their son.  Mother and son live together in one room just big enough to contain their bed.  Tahira carries their water from the village well.

To my surprise I often use the name Gloria when I am speaking to Tahira.  Years before this, Gloria is my cook in El Salvador.  Like Tahira, Gloria is slim, dark, and graceful.  She wears a white uniform rather than a bright sari, but though a world apart, the women are uncanningly alike.  Gloria, too, supports her little girl through her work for me.  She has never married.  Most of the poor in Latin America do not marry because it is too expensive; they must pay fees for the civil marriage required by the state, and they must pay fees for their church marriage.  When there is barely enough money for food, such payments are beyond reach.

Gloria does have a man in her life.  She confides to me that she takes birth control pills provided by government population control centers.  She is grateful because she knows that she cannot feed and clothe more than one child.  Years later, she calls me at my home in Colorado.  Escaping the war, she has made an illegal entry into Texas.  Yes, of course, her daughter is with her.  She laughs when I ask about her man.  He has long ago found someone else.

The father should cooperate with the mother in the raising of the child through providing financial and emotional support.  Government laws should foster acceptance of this responsibility of the father toward the upbringing of the child.

As part of a team of experts, my husband spends months in India working with farming families to help them improve the productivity of their small plots.  Occasionally, he is invited into a thatched home to eat a meal.  He sees that the food is meager, mostly rice with a bit of vegetable and fruit.  He and the father eat first, then the boys of the family.  He does not see the women who prepare the food, but from female team members, he hears that after the males have finished, the daughters of the family will eat, and finally, it will be the mother’s turn.  When the boys of the family bring home brides, (girls of twelve or thirteen years) the young brides will eat last.  Quite often there is little food left.  These girls are the child-bearers, and they give birth to underweight, sickly babies.

My husband sees that now and then a little extra money comes into the family.  If it comes to the father, he will often spend it on himself—buying food in the village market to eat with other men, or perhaps, with a real windfall, treating himself to a cheap watch or an old bicycle.  If the mother of the family can obtain a bit of cash—from sale of a few vegetables, an egg, or extra milk—she will spend it on additional food or clothing for her children.  Knowing that the surest way to improve the lot of the family is to get money into the hands of mothers, Grameen Bank in Bangladesh pioneered the idea of giving women small interest-free loans to start tiny food selling businesses in the markets.  The idea has spread across neighboring India.

Violence and abuse in the home should be eliminated and government laws should foster appropriate emotional support by both parents.

Each day while I live in Pakistan, I read the daily English language paper.  Although I feel horror and despair, I faithfully check the death notices.  Not a day passes but that several burning deaths of young married women are reported.  These deaths are sinister because it is well known that most of them are murder.  Families in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh must make dowry payments to the man marrying a daughter.  In too many cases, if the husband decides the money was not enough or he finds some other woman whose family can pay more, he and his relatives simply burn his bride to death.  They can get away with it because poor women cook over an open fire in their floating saris, and it is easy to claim that the burning is an accident.

It is also in the newspaper one day that I read about a teenage rape victim going to prison for immoral behavior.  By law in Pakistan, a woman must have four male witnesses to prove her claim of rape.  The father of the girl concurred in her sentence.

Nelo and Shahab work for my friend Carol here in Dhaka.  Nelo does the cooking and housecleaning, while Shahab takes care of the garden and drives the car.  They have been married for more than twenty years and work together to support their children.  To Carol’s horror, she walks in one day to see Shahab beating Nelo.  Stern warnings follow that such brutality must not happen again, but Shahab find the edit bewildering.  He believes he has the right to discipline his wife.  Researchers estimate that 97% of Bangladeshi men beat their wives.

The father needs to be within the home to help provide the parenting for the child and support for the mother.  Parental unity in example helps the child develop self-esteem and feel secure to that he/she does not need to look outside the home…for identity.

Our driver in Pakistan is a handsome, likable young family man.  When I ask him about his family, he proudly tells me: “I have two sons, Memsahib.”  Through my questions, I learn that he has six children.  I buy toys for them, and Munir brings me flowers in return.  He speaks more freely to my husband who reports that Munir requires his wife to keep Purdah: Tazima is not allowed to leave the street where she lives, and outside the house, she must be heavily veiled.  While Munir goes to the mosque to pray with other men, Tazima prays at home.  Inside the home, as the boys turn eight or nine, they leave her part of the house to live with their father.  They eat their meals with him, while she serves he daughters and eats last.  Her boys go to school; her girls do not.  Munir makes all decisions for his wife and children.  He can take a second wife if he wishes.  Should he wish to divorce Tazima, he says “I divorce you” three times, and the deed is done.  Of course, he keeps their children; by law, they belong to only him.

What a blessed world it would be, I muse—my eyes on the sweating women in their faded saris, beating the clay packed roof—if all these wonderful statements about husbands and fathers could be the truth.  But I know that the tragic reality of cultural and religious custom makes men the oppressors of females in much of the world.  Oh, of course, there is sometimes love.  Munir loves his family and works hard for them, but he limits his wife’s world to the walls of her home, and he denies his daughters and education.  More often, among the millions of the terribly poor, the man sees his wife and daughter as inferior being created only to bear children and serve him.  How much time is it going to take to change their conviction that God intends it to be this way?  What shall women do while they wait?

I look down again at the letter in my hand. How those who wrote it despise the word empowerment!  But the word means only “to enable.”  I wish I could have them visit me in Bangladesh.  I would introduce them to Sister Marinette.  She is a plain, matter-of-fact, humorous, Catholic nun who comes for a stint of duty among the Untouchables and stays for a lifetime of service.  Casting about for a way to help destitute divorced and widowed women, she hits upon teaching them to use wheat and rice straw that they glean to weave baskets.  These baskets are so beautiful that they are in demand all over the world, and hundreds of women are now able to support themselves and their children.

We would go to see beautiful, grey-haired Surayi Rahman who is reviving the ancient art of the Nakshi Kantha—embroidered quilts—by teaching impoverished women and girls to make them from old saris.  The Kantha are found at handicraft shops, and again, women are self-supporting through their sale.  Sister Marinette and Surayi Rahman are only two of hundreds of women and men who work in Bangladesh to give abandoned women a means of taking care of themselves.

And of course, my cook Tahira is a shining example of a woman who has arisen from the ashes of her life to independence and knowledge of her value as a human being.  When her husband leaves he, Tahira is pregnant with no means of support.  She cannot read or write.  Families for Children, a helping organization, teaches her to clean and cook so that she can work in the homes of the prosperous.  When her child is born, they assist her with day care for him while she works.  Slim and beautiful, with sparkling eyes and a wide smile, Tahira tells me that she is proud that she can feed and clothe her child.  When I visit her one-room home, she lifts her healthy little boy in her arms to hold him close.  “Oh, I love him!” she says softly, passionately.

As the women pound the rough clay into smooth hardness, one begins to sing, then the others join in.  Their voices cross the space to my window—clear and lilting through the scorching air.  Oh, I think, I wish the writers of the letter I hold could stand by my side to partake of the spirit of these women!  No, the do not abandon their roles as mothers.  After they leave their day of brutal hard work, they stop at a stall along the street to use their wage coins for food.  Then they go home to husbands and children in the little huts on the other side of my building and cook dinner for them.  They milk the cow so there is milk to drink.  They find the time to cuddle their children.

As the women’s song lifts my heart in hope, I say a silent prayer for them: that someday they might be valued and respected; that they might be free from abuse, illiteracy, and hunger; that their dreams might have knowledge of themselves as daughters of God.  And, I pray, let me and all privileged women and men everywhere stand with them in their struggle.