Textos del ámbito profesional

So how was women’s vita activa lived in PaK? A clear distinction of women’s activities was delineated by space, i.e. between private and public, with activities in the realm of the former classified as labour and in the latter as work. Within the private sphere women laboured both in the home and in the fields as, throughout northern South Asia (Sharma, 1980: 43), household land was considered an extension of the home and therefore “women [could] move about in their own fields with confidence in their right

to be seen there.”151 _{Outside the home, women overwhelmingly engaged with teaching} as work. As witnessed in rural Malaysia (Stivens, 1996: 83) the shifts in female occupation through the decades mirrored to some extent the growth in education, with rising levels of female teachers correlating with educational expansion (Table 8).

Table 8 – Number of teachers in Bagh district

Public (2008) Private (2005)

Number % Number %

Male 2254 56 604 41

Female 1736 44 871 59

Total 3990 100 1475 100

Source: AEPAM/NEMIS, 2006; P&D AJK, 2009.

The division of labour within the home followed strict age hierarchies, with older women responsible for the cooking and younger women in charge of cleaning and fetching water. Mira, a young teenager from Sarian said that “we [daughters] do the safai [cleaning] and mother sits on the chula [stove].” The sharing of household chores among the women of the house created at times conflicts,152 as well as bonds of ‘mutual reliance’ (Grover, 2011: 71), depending on the dyad. Mothers and daughters routinely depended on each other, with daughters taking on chores when mothers were ill or absent and mothers ‘training’ their daughters in ‘housework’ from an early age to become ‘good wives’. Mira’s cousin Myriam said that in her family the daughters made rotis when the mother was away. “I can’t remember when I started making them.” The mother-daughter bond was nurtured (through visits) beyond the time the daughter                                                                                                                

married and moved away. In Delhi, Grover (2011) notices that a married daughter’s ability to do chores is more valued than unmarried daughters or daughters-in-law as she is considered more experienced and familiarised within the natal home.

The value of being a ‘good housewife’ who did household chores was reverberated across gender lines and ages. Zubaida, a housewife from Thial said that “clothes,

decorations for the house and a clean house; those are the wishes of a woman.” Raja

Yasin, who had previously worked as a cook for an English couple in Dubai, mentioned that one characteristic that struck him at the time was that the couple shared chores. “Here women do all the housework [ghar ka kaam].” Despite using the word kaam, the meaning attached to it was that of ‘labour’. Equally, when Papanek (1982: 198) describes the defining interdependence and division of labour among gender where “men generally do not do things which are defined as being ‘women’s work’ but are

dependant on women to do them [and] outside the home, women are equally dependent on men”, this gendered division of labour can be seen as an interdependent male-work-

public and female-labour-private dichotomy.

The fact that men did not do household chores meant that women who worked outside the home were left with a conundrum. On the one hand they were responsible for ‘houselabour’ and, on the other hand, they wanted (or needed)153 to work outside. Overwhelmingly these women fell under what Beneria and Sen (1981) call ‘the burden of the double day’: they engaged with productive activities outside the home while at the same time being responsible for the bulk of reproductive tasks within the home. As Saadia, a married schoolteacher at READ said, “women working is fine as long as your

house and your children are not affected.154 Teaching is not a good thing, because when you’re trying to divide yourself in two places, your health gets affected.” This was

particularly problematic for married women with young children who did not have other women in the house capable of taking over their share of ‘houselabour’. In fact, as Rashed et al’s (1989, in: Naqvi and Shahnaz, 2002) study show, the likelihood of women being employed increased with the presence of other women in the house. The refusal to renegotiate ‘houselabour’ might had to do with men’s reluctance on “any

encroachment on their leisure time” (Kabeer, 2000: 124), although, as Harrison (2001)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    152 _{See Chapter Five on the saas-bahu dyad.}  

153 _{In Bangladesh’s garment industry women more often entered the labour market more by need than} choice (Kabeer, 2000).  

shows in rural Zambia, rather than being idle, men are often occupied in creating, maintaining and improving social networks and contacts, in the hope of gaining access to better economic opportunities. Also important in these negotiations was men’s image as breadwinners outside the house (see Grover, 2011). Women working outside (and men inside) “not only destroys husband’s image as a ‘provider’, but also the status of

the family” (Rashid, 2008: 233), and can be taken as a public statement of men’s ability

to fulfil the roles of provider and protector (Kabeer, 2000).

The decision for women to work outside – overwhelmingly as teachers – had therefore to be done in consultation with their families. In these consultations, a form of renegotiating the patriarchal bargain, women treaded “a balance between their basic

needs and social expectations of gender norms” (Rashid, 2008: 235), as often they were

“valued as producers of heirs rather than as producers of food” (Sharma, 1980: 14). Working women renegotiated the patriarchal bargain not only by proving to be capable of working outside the house and yet still play the role of the ‘good daughter’ or ‘good mother/wife’, but also by having to prove that their work was morally and socially acceptable. An important factor in these renegotiations was their relative power in relation to the other household members, which also determined the effective possession of the resources she produced or earned (Whitehead, 1981). For instance, a ‘good daughter’ or a ‘good wife’ always shared her income with the household head out of her goodwill. Zainab, Ali Naqvi’s unmarried daughter said: “I keep the money [salary] for me and spend it on food and clothes, but I also contributed to rebuilding the

house. My father never asks me for money, I give it myself.” From the mid-1970s

onwards, due to a drastic increase in male migration, women found a type of work which, despite being public, was morally and socially acceptable – teaching.

The multiple effects male migration has on gender relations in South Asian Muslim communities has been described by several authors (Gardner, 1995; Gardner and Osella, 1994; Rashid, 2008): it can increase the independence of migrants’ wives, allow women to enter (some) public male spaces, yet it can also increase female seclusion and women’s workload. In this region male migration to the Gulf also affected women’s access to work by, on the one hand, increasing a demand for education – for both men and women – and, on the other hand, motivating many male teachers to migrate,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     154 _{The ideology of maternal altruism, where a mother and wife always put the family and children first} (Whitehead, 1981: 107).  

therefore creating a vacuum to be filled by women. Still women needed to negotiate, both within and outside the home, the fact that teaching was considered a public activity. As Kabeer (2000: 329) states, “intra-familial relationships (…) reflected the

family’s insertion into larger social hierarchies”; consequently the family’s class and

caste position and “the extent to which it valued, or could afford to value, dominant

norms about the division of labour among family members” also influenced this

negotiation. The underlying elements in this negotiation were that of status and honour. As Rashid (2008: 211) states, “mere money does not bring status and prestige for

women and their families, especially not if the money is earned in a process which is not socially acceptable (…) women earn their status by being a good mother, wife, and daughter-in-law.” Throughout northern South Asia not having women working (outside

the house) is often a sign of high status, as Gardner (1995: 209) identified in many studies of gender in the region, “which focus on two intersecting phenomena: the sexual

division of labour, and ideologies of female modesty and shame.”

“Women in South Asia bear a special responsibility for family honour;

insofar as a woman conforms to certain standards of modest feminine conduct her family’s status is maintained or even improved, whist unwomanly conduct is a blot not just on her personal reputation but on the reputation of the whole family.” (Sharma, 1980: 3)

While still having to prove that employment outside the home was morally and socially acceptable for women to perform, in this region they had the advantage that teaching itself was an occupation which was morally and socially acceptable: it involved minimal interaction with men and more with children; it was easily assimilated into traditional feminine role concepts; there was a need for more teachers; in most cases the physical distance between the house and the school was minimal; and education was a status marker, traditionally linked with the Syed biraderi. Yet, due to the physical mobility aspect of teaching, women also had to renegotiate the concept of purdah, which they did physically by using veiling as a strategy to legitimise working outside (Rashid, 2008), and intellectually by attempting to reinterpret purdah based on a practical morality, akin to Kabeer’s (2000: 91) “purdah of the mind” and Kirmani’s (2009: 55) “purdah of the heart.”155 _{Finally, as Gardner (1995) discovered in rural} Bangladesh, veiling and other external indicators of purdah also created female status                                                                                                                

and added to their personal power,156 as seen in this region with some female schoolteachers engaging in the organisation of Quranic readings and Milaads157 for other women.

As in other South Asian Muslim societies, in PaK too the gendered division of labour rooted in local ideologies of honour and status limited women’s engagement with public activities. Due to the prevalent seclusion and exclusion practices, women mostly ‘laboured’, only sometimes ‘worked’, and seldom ‘acted’. The drastic increase in male migration to the Gulf and its spillover effect of an increment in the demand for more education opened up a space for women to engage with work outside the home, signalling a shift from private-labour to public-work. Many women successfully renegotiated gender roles, allowing them to become schoolteachers. Yet they first had to prove that their work was morally and socially acceptable. The question remains as to how the earthquake as an event further affected, if at all, men’s narratives and actions regarding women’s activity. In the next sections I analyse these narratives – as well as how they were used differently by different actors – in order to examine if the earthquake was indeed a catalyst for an increase in women’s mobility and work outside the home, and what this entailed.