Reflections on fatherhood: How can we quantify a woman’s contribution to family wealth?
Women contribute time, labour and emotions that are not inferior to material possessions, but are the soul and essence of the family.
Recently, the Supreme Court directed that a marriage party must prove their contribution in the matrimonial property in order to determine their share upon divorce.
The court was correcting its earlier ruling that gave spouses equal share of matrimonial property in case of dissolution of a marriage. This unsurprisingly generated a huge fuss in the social media. Legalities aside, the social components of this ruling are profound.
Marriage is a function of many factors and it is only natural that some of them fail. Hence divorce may happen once in a while.
When that happens, a decision has to be made on how best to apportion joint properties. But I wish it never gets to this, because there are many essential dynamics that determine property acquisition and ownership that are hard to determine.
You hear men regularly confessing among themselves how their homes are incomplete without their wives. “For us men we build houses; it is the women who build homes,” is a common idiom in my community.
This wisdom is liberally referenced to in the clubs as men collectively celebrate their absence from their homes boasting that once they build houses, it’s only fair that women are given room to make homes out of them.
The difference between a house and a home would explain why it is an injustice to demand spouses to demonstrate their material contributions.
A house is a physical structure, while home is the intangible ecosystem of the family—the appearance, the daily living, emotions, and the relationships. Women are compelled by culture to invest their time and resources towards this non-material component of the family. This investment may be a lot, like the time spent in motherhood, but hardly translates into concrete property.
Most men who hailed the ruling argued that in modern families, both women and men work and therefore potentially stand equal chances of owning property.
This ignores the fact that even when both the husband and wife are working, their expenditures are likely to be different based on their respective roles.
I acknowledge that many men indirectly spend on their homes through their wives. But even when they both have money, women are more likely to invest theirs in the family and home in qualitative aspects that are essential but not easily quantified into property.
For instance, a woman is more likely to buy food in the house than a man. Visit the grocery section of any store, or the kitchen wares and food markets and see the number of women compared to men.
In my house, I have three daughters. I have never bought any of them sanitary pads or inner wears; their mom does, who also buys them many other things I don’t even know. Once the children have grown up into adults, how would a mother quantify this “contribution?”
Consider also the investment of time. A woman is more likely to take the child to the hospital than the man as a visit to any paediatric clinic can attest. And in the houses, mothers attend to children more than fathers on activities like school homework, personal hygiene, clothing, etc.
All these contributions, time, labour and emotions on the non-physical components of the family, are not inferior to the material possessions. It is the soul, the essence and integrity of the family.
When break-up calls and the woman is asked to prove her contribution, she is likely to be judged unfairly. Because the many trips to paediatric clinics, the sleepless nights changing the baby will not have a material quotient.
Unfortunately, during divorce, a decision has to be made.
