The Tale of Two Books... And How I Broke the Binding on My Unwritten Instruction Manual

I recently wrote an article for the White Coat Investor, and I would love to share it with you...

My grandmother got married at the age of 9. Her husband was 14 at the time. That was when her education ended and her entry into family life began.

My mother got married when she was 20 after receiving her bachelor’s degree in education. My father was 30 and in the process of obtaining his master’s degree. Soon after getting married and migrating to Canada, she worked in a factory to help make ends meet. She later went on to become a nurse.

My husband and I, both physicians, got married at the age of 29 just as we were completing our respective residency programs.

Women were once considered someone else’s property. We were told, either explicitly or implied, that we were under our fathers’ keep until we were married, at which time we were transferred to the care of our husbands. In some cultures, the parents of the groom were given a dowry—gifts of money, gold, property, or other goods—at the time of marriage. Often, there was bargaining involved. In other cultures, “bride service,” aka “bride price,” was given by the groom’s family to the bride’s family as payment for the bride. In other places, the bride’s father often “gave the bride away” to her husband at the wedding and paid for the expenses associated with the ceremony. In all these cases, there are subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) implications that the groom and his family were doing the bride’s family a favor by taking her off their hands.

To answer your burning question, no, there wasn’t a dowry involved at my wedding. However, I often joked that I was the dowry because I had secured a career that could sustainably create wealth for our family. That, ladies and gentlemen, was my master plan. (Insert evil laugh here.) With this history, a statement of this nature could be misconstrued as disrespectful. The truth is, in my heart, I carry deep reverence for the generations of women who endured great suffering under this belief that the value of women to society was that of being someone else’s property. My “master plan” was to never let that happen to me. Even at a young age, I could see how important financial security was to maintain one’s well-being.

It seemed to me that when women lacked financial security, they lost their ability to remove themselves (and their children) from potentially toxic, or even abusive, situations. Part of the driving force for me to become a physician was to remove myself from the cycle of dependency on someone else for my livelihood....

Ready to read more? Click here for the full article:  "The Tale of Two Books"