When Women (Didn’t) Work

Nana labored without rest — but the system only saw the absence of a salary

My grandmother, the second woman from left to right, standing up. She has her arm up, and she is embracing a younger girl. She told me that they took this picture when they finished the seamstress course.

My maternal grandmother turns 84 this May of 2025. That’s eighty-four years of time and opportunity to handle money, learn to count it, manage it, and understand what it means to deserve it.

Yet, my grandmother never really handled money.

I don’t mean physically holding bills — though even that, I’m not entirely sure she ever did — I mean in the figurative sense of knowing what it’s like to earn monetary compensation for hard work.

This idea of someone working and receiving nothing in return seems contradictory. And for younger people, whose entire way of life is increasingly distant from that reality, it may be inconceivable. It's almost like a lie.

“So your grandmother never worked, then?” some might ask me, echoing the phrase I used to associate with my mother whenever I was asked at school if she “worked.”

My answer was always the same for years: “My mother doesn’t work.”

I remember how normal this seemed to me. There was no sense of shame or feeling different from my peers. After all, none of our mothers “really worked,” so saying that my mother was a domestic worker and farmer — and my grandmother had been one, too —…