There is a photograph on my phone that I have never been able to delete. In it, my mother is standing in the kitchen, her dupatta slightly askew, her hands dusted with flour. She is not looking at the camera. She is looking at something just outside the frame, something I could never quite see, no matter how many times I studied that image. I used to think she was distracted. Now I know she was somewhere else entirely. She was in that place women go when the life they are living is not the one they would have chosen. My mother was not a working professional. She had no salary, no savings, no account in her own name. Her entire economic existence was mediated through her husband, what he gave, when he gave it, and on what terms. She was, by every conventional measure, a devoted homemaker; she cooked, she cleaned, she raised children, she held the household together with a quiet, tireless competence that went unacknowledged and entirely unpaid. The world told her this was enough. The world was wrong. Her marriage was not a happy one. I will not dress that truth in softer language, because she spent too many years doing exactly that, softening, accommodating, enduring. There were years of turbulence, of tension that settled into the walls of our home like damp, years when the atmosphere at the dinner table was something you had to learn to breathe around. She was unhappy. She knew she was unhappy. She wanted, in the way that any person with a pulse and a soul wants, something different. But she could not leave. Not because the doors were locked. Not because anyone physically prevented her. She could not leave because she had nowhere to go and, more precisely, no means to get there. She had no income, no financial history, no professional identity, no safety net of her own making. A woman with no money is a woman with no options, and a woman with no options is a woman who must stay. So, she stayed. Year after year, she stayed. She carried the weight of that staying in her body, in the lines of her face, in that faraway look in the kitchen photograph.
Financial empowerment is not a luxury for Pakistani women. It is the practical difference between a woman who has choices and a woman who does not.
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to reduce my mother to her suffering. She was so much more than the constraints placed upon her. She was funny, wryly, unexpectedly funny, the kind that catches you off guard. She was perceptive. She noticed everything, the shift in someone’s mood, the unspoken thing in a crowded room, the small injustice others walked past without blinking. She was a woman of enormous interior richness, living in circumstances that had very little room for that richness to breathe. She was wise in the particular way that people become wise when they have paid for their knowledge in pain. It was she who sat with me, more than once, and said words I have never forgotten, “Beti, fend for yourself. Be a career woman. Never let your survival depend on anyone else.” She did not say this bitterly, though she had every right to bitterness. She said it the way you say something when you have understood it all the way down to the bone, with a quiet, absolute certainty. She could not rewrite her own story. However, she was determined, with everything she had, to give me a different first chapter. I have thought about those words constantly as I have grown older, and I have come to understand them as something more than maternal advice. They were a kind of testimony. A woman who had lived inside financial dependence was telling me, with unflinching clarity, what that dependence had cost her. Not in abstract terms. Not as a statistic or a policy position. Rather, it was a lived reality, intimate and irreversible, the reality of a woman who loved her children, who had dreams of her own, and who found herself unable to act on either because she had no economic ground to stand on.
Pakistan is full of women like my mother. Brilliant, capable, deeply feeling women who have been told, in a thousand explicit and implicit ways, that their place is inside the home and their provision comes from outside it. Women who have accepted this arrangement not because it serves them, but because the alternative, building an independent life in a society that does not make space for it, is so daunting as to feel impossible. Women who stay in marriages they would leave, in homes that have become prisons, because financial dependence has quietly, thoroughly removed their ability to choose. This is the conversation we are not having loudly enough in Pakistan. We talk about women’s education, which is vital. We talk about safety, which is essential. When it comes to financial independence, though, the specific, liberating power of a woman who earns, who saves, who can stand on her own two feet in a crisis, is the foundation on which all other freedoms rest. A woman who cannot support herself is a woman whose other rights are always conditional, always subject to someone else’s grace. My mother never got that foundation. She built her life on ground that was not hers. When the ground shifted, she had nothing to catch herself with. I grieve that. I grieve the versions of herself she never got to meet, the one who might have worked, who might have discovered what she was capable of beyond the four walls she inhabited, who might have left when leaving became necessary and rebuilt with her own hands.
I carry her forward now. Every time I make a decision about my own career, my own finances, my own future, I am living out the instruction she gave me in that kitchen, with flour on her hands and something unreadable in her eyes. I am the career woman she told me to be. I am fending for myself, the way she could not. Financial empowerment is not a luxury for Pakistani women. It is not a Western concept or a feminist abstraction. It is the practical difference between a woman who has choices and a woman who does not. It is the difference between staying and leaving, between silence and voice, between a life that happens to you and a life that you build. My mother taught me that. She taught me with her words; she taught me, more painfully, with her life. I do not want her story to be rare. I want it to be the last of its kind.
The writer holds an MSc in Economics & Finance from LSE. She can be reached at syedasalmatahir [email protected].