Women In Our Lives: An anthology

Rania Chellah, 15, Meknes.

What do you know about the 80s? Personally, I do not know much about it, but I know that it was a time when Moroccan women suffered from all kind of discrimination, when their large majority did not get the opportunity to go school nor to wear something different from a jellaba, and when gender equality was not a thing. However, it was also the time when my mother grew up, in a small meknessi street, and the time she decided she would become someone fabulous.

Middle and high school were a real struggle for a girl who was not allowed to do her homework instead of helping with the chores. In fact, my mother’s family and community simply did not give the same value to her education that they gave to the one of her male cousins and other relatives. They saw her as someone who should stay home, get married and have kids. They saw her as “a girl” should be seen. Even my grandmother didn’t see the point in educating her own daughter instead of just find her a husband and teach her how to cook. However, my mom, although her young age, always managed to top every class she was taking and to not let the negativity she was surrounded by get to her. She made her education her number one priority and tried to convince her family to do so.

After graduating high school, it even took a whole summer vacation to convince my grandmother that college was necessary. My mother decided to pursue studies in biology, dreaming about becoming a pharmacist. Her motivation came from the idea of becoming an independent woman; a woman who do not wait for her husband to work for her. But, after two years of studying in meknes, she started to understand that she needed to do more if she wanted to achieve her goals, so she came up with the idea to go study in Russia, knowing that it wouldn’t be simple to convince her mother. However, she raised that challenge and even, somehow, finished by succeeding. She knew that attending this new 58