There is no doubt that poverty interacts with gender in complicated ways: the experience of poverty is often gendered; its causes are not always gender neutral either. When talking about the feminisation of poverty, we are often offered some grand narratives about the reasons and effects of poverty for women and girls. For instance, poverty leads to a lack of economic, social and educational resources, which then renders women and girls vulnerable to many forms of exploitation that end up perpetuating the cycles of poverty. Amongst these narratives, there is also some evidence suggesting that intergenerational transmission of disadvantages exists (e.g. Chant, 2007), that is to say, gendered poverty often gets transmitted from older female family members to younger ones. But I am more interested in these disadvantages in less formal and more personal ways here. In what follows, I wish to bring to attention the intergenerational effect of the experience of poverty on women’s decision-making, specifically, how my childhood encounters with poverty, influenced by my mother’s role within the household, might have shaped some of my life decisions.
First, a caveat: it is not absolute or severe poverty that I talk about here. I hope others can agree with me that the fact that a lot of women who are much worse off than anyone I mention here shouldn’t undermine (too much!) the meaningfulness of this discussion.
My mother’s experience would perhaps still strike a chord with many: my father’s demanding work schedule left my mother shouldering the bulk of childcare responsibilities. Naturally, her job prospects were limited to roles with short working hours and light workloads that offered meagre wages. This means that she mostly worked with whatever funds my father made available to her and there was always little certainty how much that was every week, month, or year. I’ve sometimes experienced material deprivation because of it – of course, child poverty is so intertwined with poverty experienced by women! But what actually left an indelible mark on me was one of the deciding factors that led to such deprivation—the lack of decision making power on my mother’s side: clearly she had minimal control over household finances and limited autonomy in shaping her own life, rendering her almost entirely vulnerable to the decisions of others.
I of course live a very different life compared to my mother – growing up in a society that increasingly embraces feminist ideals has afforded me many more resources and opportunities to have independence and agency. I wasn’t disadvantaged (too much?) formally because of my gender. However, I did start to wonder how much the experience I had as a child with poverty, which was partly due to my mother’s position in the household, has changed the decisions I make in life.
An example would be the insistence on being independent, to use the word very loosely here. Many women around me, myself included, find it impossibly difficult to ask for help. The help I am referring to here is not help from my friends and families with interpersonal relationships or daily chores, but the ability to trouble other people and ask for favours, say in my workplace, for my self-development or career progression, without being plagued by the fear of not being independent or self-sufficient enough. I am less willing to simply attribute this mentality to neoliberal thinking, but rather an emotive response as a result of associating the experience of impoverishment with a lack of independence: we need to rely only on ourselves in order to escape the fate of being made badly off the way our mothers were. Of course we know in abstract terms that we all live in a society with webs of overlapping relationships and mutual interdependence. However, to ask for help would still mean to step a bit closer into our mothers’ reality and to potentially negate our effort to run away from it. We are made to be terrified of that possibility still.
Some find it confusing that the income gaps between women and men are widening despite the evidence suggesting their competitiveness being more on par than ever. Setting aside the question of whether labouring is liberatory in any meaningful way, do some women disadvantage themselves informally like me because they still keep an overly vigilant eye on being ‘independent’, thus refraining from asking for help when needed?
If we were luck egalitarians, we might aim to eliminate this kind of effect entirely, as it is not our mothers’ fault nor our own but would nonetheless put ourselves in a disadvantageous position at times. However, I don’t, at least not personally, find these influences in themselves bad – they have become part of who I am and how I perceive the world. But am I still trying too hard to flee from the faintly familiar image resembling my mother, a woman who was made so vulnerable that her encounters with terrible experiences such as poverty hinged almost entirely on the deliberations of others?
References:
Chant, S. (2007) Gender, Generation and Poverty: Exploring the “Feminization of Poverty” in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Author:
Yuxin Su is a PhD student at UCL. She’s interested in how teachers can make moral decisions in the classroom. She’s also the editor of this blog.