Necessary Women is a short story by Karin Slaughter that first appeared in a collection called Three Twisted Stories.
This story’s date of publication was February 10, 2015.
Necessary Women book description
In a border town between Georgia and Alabama, in a three-room house made of cement block, a fourteen-year-old girl watches her mother die.
Her father is a long-haul trucker, away for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Her mother, with two menial jobs cleaning restrooms and working nights at the laundry, had been just thirty years old.
A week before she died, noticing her daughter getting attention from a boy, the girl’s mother warned her not to make the same mistakes she did. Now, her father tells her, she’s the woman of the house, and she must do all the necessary things the woman must do: the cleaning, the cooking, the laundry.
But there’s a lot more to being a woman than fixing dinner and doing the wash. Her mother was right: She won’t end up like her — and she’ll do anything to prove it.