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The Invisible Hand: A Matriarch’s Unnoticed Labour
Abstract
A woman’s role in the home and its upkeep is usually taken for granted, naturalised, and accepted. Women have had to take on responsibilities that they do not get accounted for and do not become recognized for. More centrally, through this naturalised labour of care and responsibility, women make significant sacrifices for their family that affects their choice of marriage, children, career, and personal choice. While this is a common phenomenon largely addressed in the literature on gender, I choose to focus this presentation on a personalised story of invisible women’s labour, my grandmother. My grandmother Laila, or Mama Lolla as she is named by her grandkids, has many characteristics that cannot be contained in one abstract, let alone one presentation. However, through her life history, I will reveal more than only women's invisible domestic labour. I will shed light on a story of a woman who was born and grew up in landed gentry family in Beheira governorate who got married at seventeen, before finishing her school education and moved to live in another village in Beheira governorate when she got married to my grandfather, the village Omda (government appointed village headman). After his death over a decade later, she got married to his younger brother who took over the Omodeya (village headman role), he also died two decades later. She bore six children, four from the first marriage (including my mother) and two from the second marriage. For the last four decades the family home in Beheira is where she resides with my maternal uncle, the present-day Omda. She spends her days tending to the chickens, goats, and cows, cooking for the family members who are present, and serving meals and beverages to the tens of village members who appear daily at the house to solve their disputes with the Omda, my uncle. Mama Lolla was also a central figure in my own doctoral research when I had to resort to conducting my research in my family village midway through my fieldwork period after losing access to another Nile Delta village where I was initially conducting my fieldwork. This presentation aims to address the invisibility of female labour in Egyptian households through the lived history of the invisibility of an Egyptian woman in the countryside and essential to the sustenance of the rural political structure of the Omodeya. An intimate family story but equally a broader familiar story.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None