By Fatima Ali Busuguma
Women are the pioneers of any nation. The Nigerian culture attaches great importance to women, who comprise half of the world’s population. According to a report by the UN Secretary General, women account for 50 percent of human resources, making them the second-largest human resource after men in terms of potential.
Women are the key to sustainable development and quality of life in the family. The variety of roles the women assume in the family are those of wife, leader, administrator, manager of family income, and last but not least, the most important, mother.
As a wife, a woman is a man’s helpmate, partner, and comrade. She sacrifices her personal pleasure and ambitions, sets the standard of morality, relieves stress and strain, on the husband, and maintains peace and order in the household. Thereby, she creates a necessary environment for her male partner to think more about the economic enlistment of the family. She is the source of inspiration for men’s high endeavours and worthwhile achievements in life.
She is by his side in all crises and shares all of his successes and accomplishments. Likewise, she is the person to whom he turns for love, sympathy, understanding, comfort, and recognition.
She is the symbol of purity, faithfulness, submission, and devotion to her husband. A well-ordered, disciplined household is essential to normal family life. The woman in the family assumes this function. She is the chief executive of an enterprise. She assigns duties among family members according to their interests and abilities, and provides resources in-term of equipment and materials to accomplish the job.
Furthermore, she is responsible for meal preparation and serving, clothing selection and care, laundering, and house furnishing and maintenance. As an administrator, she organises various social functions in the family for social development. She also acts as a director of recreation. She plans various recreational activities to meet the needs of young and old members of the family.
The woman acts as the humble manager of the family income. It is her responsibility to secure the maximum return from every penny spent. She always prefers to prepare a surplus budget instead of a deficit budget. When it comes to spending money, she is very calculated about her losses and gains. She distributes judiciously the income among different categories, such as necessities, comforts, and luxuries.
The woman in the family also contributes to the family income through her own earning within or outside the home. She has positive contribution to the family income by the work. She herself performs in the home and uses waste products for productive purposes.
The whole burden of childbearing and a greater part of the child rearing task are carried out by the woman in the family. She is primarily responsible for the child’s habit of self-control, orderliness, industriousness, theft, or honesty. Her contacts with the child during the most formative period of his development sets up his behaviour pattern. She is thus responsible for the maintenance of utmost discipline in the family.
She is the child’s first teacher. Furthermore, she passes on her social heritage to the child. It is from the mother that the child learns the laws of the race, the manner of men, moral code and ideals. The mother, because of her intimate and sustained contact with the child, she is able to discover and nurture the child’s special traits aptitudes and attitudes which subsequently play a key role in the shaping of his personality.
As a mother, she is the family health officer. She is very much concerned about the physical wellbeing of every member of the family, the helpless infant, the sickly child, the adolescent youth, the senescent parent. She organises the home and its activities in such a way so that each member of the family has proper food, adequate sleep and sufficient recreation. Not only that, but she made the home a place of quite comfortable and appropriate setting for the children through her talent. Besides, she cultivates taste in interior design and arrangement, so that the home becomes an inviting, restful and cheerful place.
The mother is the central personality of the home and the family circle. All the members turn to her for sympathy, understanding, and recognition. A woman devotes her time, labour and thought for the welfare of the members of her family. The woman performs the role of wife, partner, organiser, administrator, director, re-creator, disburser, economist, mother, disciplinarian, teacher, health officer, artist and queen in the family at the same time. Apart from it, a woman plays a key role in the socio-economic development of the society.
They should act as social leaders, speaking out against women’s violence, domestic and workplace exploitation, dowry prohibition superstition, and other social atrocities. They should be members of religious institutions, delivering spiritual messages to adolescent boys and girls in order to eradicate juvenile delinquency from society. Furthermore, it is women who have sustained societal growth and shaped the future of nations.
In the emerging complex social scenario, women have a vital role to play in different sectors. They can no longer be considered mere harbingers of peace, but are emerging as a source of power and a symbol of progress.
Busuguma, a corps member with PRNigeria, wrote from Wuye
