Today I want to apologize to my mother for saying all those years when she was alive that ‘she does not work, she is a housewife’. She was given in marriage when she was a 10-year-old child. Since then she woke up at dawn, worked all day to make breakfast for everyone, and then lunch for everyone and then dinner for everyone, she served everyone food,she cleaned everyone’s dishes, she cleaned the house, the courtyard and the garden, she washed everyone’s clothes, she cleaned up everyone’s messes and she made everyone’s beds but she did not get time to go to her bed even at midnight.

My mother often told me that she could earn some money if she worked as a maid in some people’s houses. I laughed at my mother. I could not imagine my mother as other’s housemaid. My father was a renowned physician. He earned a decent amount of money. But the money he earned was HIS money, not my mother’s money. My mother had to beg my father for money. My mother had no rights and no freedom only because she did not have her own money. She could not buy anything she wanted to buy. She could not go anywhere she wanted to go. My father gave her money only when he wanted to give her money. My mother had to do what she was instructed to do with HIS money.

We know they don’t count women’s work but they count on women’s work. We know that the unpaid work done by women is worth $11 trillion. There is a conspiracy to glorify women’s unpaid housework. They have given housework a nice sweet name, it is now ‘homemaking’. They now call housewives ‘homemakers’. But nice names can’t make penniless women happy and satisfied.

Women must have their own money and their own house, so that they do not have to beg anyone for money, so that nobody can ever say to any woman, ‘get out of my house’.

Housework must be shared by all family members. No single person can or should be responsible for all of the household chores and childcare. Women should work for money, HER money.