If you ever want to know what being dragged on social media feels like, ask “can women really manage a home and a career’ on X (fka Twitter), turn off your data and come back in a few hours to see the chaos you’ve created.
To most people, the answer is obvious — thousands of women do it every day. But it’s not that simple for the six women on the last episode of Nigerians Talk.
“Nobody ever bloody asks a man this nonsense question” — Gail
The first question anybody is tempted to ask when they see a career woman is, ‘How do you manage your home?’ Only one person in a marriage has been conditioned from birth to handle the home front, and it is certainly not the man.
When a Nigerian woman is old enough to spell her name, everybody tells her that her purpose is to get married, have children, and manage a home. That, in Gail’s words, is why this question still exists.
“Society likes to tell you that you can be superwoman” — Chineye
The perfect wife wakes by 5 a.m. to make breakfast for her kids, beats traffic in time for her nine-to-five and gets home to make dinner before her husband returns from work. All without asking for help, of course.
Many women are convinced that they can do it all. Apparently, only lazy women hire nannies and let others make dinner for their families. But let’s be honest, it’s impossible to be an ambitious career woman and the perfect homebody at the same time.
“We don’t like to talk about the fact that women do unpaid care work, but men don’t have to deal with that” — Onyeka
Being the woman of the house is the same thing as running a year-round, 24-hour hotel service, except you get no breaks, no salary and your guests never leave. Managing a home and building a career is the equivalent of having two full-time jobs. The physical and emotional labour required to run a home consumes a woman so much that she takes care of everyone else but herself. At the end of the day, she’s overworked, underpaid and sometimes, underappreciated.
“This is why a lot of women are choosing to remain child-free” — Mariam
Imagine what the world would look like if women got period leave. Motherhood is a 24-hour job, and it is just easier to be a working-class babe without a baby to breastfeed and two more in kindergarten. Women who juggle careers and a home do not have the luxury of choosing between work meetings and crying babies. The system is not sympathetic to working mothers, and many women would rather take the easy way out than take on another full-time job.
“Women should stop fighting for custody” — Gail
After a messy divorce, men become middle-aged bachelors while women end up as single mothers. Gail believes women should learn the art of self-preservation from men and stop fighting for custody. In her words: “instead of taking the kids, dye your hair, get a tattoo, find a nice young man to sleep with — and let him do it”.
“The fact that his mother did it doesn’t mean you have to” — Chineye
Many men still exist in the 1970s and 1980s, when many women didn’t have as much going on as the present-day woman. To many men, having a wife who doubles as a house manager is their birthright. They are genuinely confused as to why their wives find it difficult to care for one child when their mothers took care of ten.
“Marrying just for love is a joke” — Onyeka
At the heart of this conversation, the answer is the partner you choose. Onyeka says marrying for love means looking at life through rose-coloured glasses. She says young women should treat marriage like a business decision, as marriage to the wrong partner can kill your career. A marriage is a negotiation of what the rest of your life will look like. Choosing that based on emotions alone is a dangerous gamble. To the women on this episode of Nigerians Talk, marrying for love alone is a bad joke.
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