An Unpaid Upper Servant

Up to fifty years ago, there are not many stories about women like me.

Single women content to be without a man, childless women who didn’t long for children, working women who aren’t doing menial tasks unpaid, women who have the right to bodily integrity and the laws to demand redress should this be infringed upon (admittedly with likely caveats as ‘dressing modestly’ and ‘being in the right place’ and ‘coming from the right kind of people’)...

The daughters of Zelophehad had to argue for their inheritance before the Law. In the absence of any other testament, should my parents die, the Law will automatically include me in their inheritance. I am accorded the right of inheritance as a bodily heir of my mother and father, and an emotional heir of my stepfather.

How far we’ve come.

And yet how far we could still fall.

There’s an LM Montgomery story in the book Tales Of Avonlea, where a barely-teenaged girl is given her newborn brother by her mother and charged to look after him as the mother dies. The pair are sent to an uncle who resents the pair being dumped upon him but who isn’t willing to turf them out for fear of being seen as unkind to his relatives. They grow up, the sister ‘mothering’ her brother all the way, looking after him, keeping house for him when he grows up. Only...when the brother marries, his wife doesn't want his sister in the house. So the sister goes back to the uncle’s house and takes up a position as ‘an unpaid, upper servant’.

That would have been my lot 100 years ago, even in China: an unmarried woman in a common family would be an unpaid assistant to the married women of the household.

Financial status is not the same as personhood status, but it matters a lot on our capitalist, money-oriented world where the worth of a person is noted down in their earning/productive capacity.