Raising Children In Ramatoulaye Fall

Decent Essays
Raising kids is a task that requires one’s full attention, love, and support, but what more does it require from a person when one takes on the task of raising twelve children by herself after her husband abandons her to marry their daughter’s best friend? At the same time the women’s liberation movement gains popularity and women begin to question the submissive culture that dominates Senegal communities, mother and teacher Ramatoulaye Fall finds herself challenged with the task at hand. The internal and external conflicts that come from transitioning between a historically male-dominated culture to a progressive society of social freedom, while figuring out how to raise children during this shift, is one that’s familiar across most nations, …show more content…
Neighbors and lifelong friends believed that she was making multiple mistakes when she had turned down the hands of two suitors after Modou passed away from a heart attack. Farmata, Ramatoulaye’s neighbor, believed so deeply that a woman needed a husband in order to live a happy life that she had cursed Ramatoulaye with yet another Modou for turning down the most fitting suitor, Daouda Dieng. Ramatoulaye, however, could not put the burden of being a co-wife on another innocent woman, for Daouda already had a wife whom he fathered multiple children back home. The difference between Daouda and Ramatoulaye at this point measured the level of respect that each had for the other woman, Daouda not taking into consideration the impact that a second wife would have on his first, while Ramatoulaye knowing the pain and hurt of a husband marrying a second woman. With the first hand in marriage, offered by Modou’s elder brother Tamsir, Ramatoulaye exploded with feminist views challenging the traditions of levirate marriage, claiming that there was no right of Modou’s brothers to inherit her as a wife; she was not an object to be passed around to the same extent that she was not an object of womanhood for men to collect through marriages. She had remained quiet for thirty years of marriage with Modou, but as the men in her life remained persistent in regulating her

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