Article Title: Mothering across generations
Article Summary
The article at hand is the author’s musing on her emotionally fulfilling childhood, the role of her female guardians in it, and an assertion of the one duty she believes it placed on her shoulders. She starts by relating that her family was large but not the soundest economically, and that they lived in Mumbai. She elucidates on the gender segregation present at every step, how the women of the house ate after the men did, and how they were provided with minimal education and responsibility, being some of the notable points. One of these women, the author’s grandmother, was victim of all these disadvantages, but also exceptionally gentle, the emotional comforting her expected role in the house’s society. The author narrates that women, through the past and until when she was a child, were taught to put themselves in second place and have no strong preferences, and writes of how her mother found a way to stop the complete effacement of her grandmother’s identity and likings. The main point of the author, however, is this – all these imperfections in society did not reduce the emotional richness of her childhood. She received a lot of love without having to offer a lot in return, and believes that people privileged enough to have received the same should absolutely return it to their children, and live lives that are worthy of such past unconditional support.
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Words to learn from this Article:
Tenement: a large house containing several small habitable divisions.
Undermining: underestimating or ridiculing the authority of.
Agency: the power to influence.
Effacing: removing, fading out.
Dissuaded: strongly discouraged.
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Reading Motivation
- Opportunities will reveal themselves once you work hard.
- Don’t search for shortcuts: everyone needs to put in the hard yards.
