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Pakistan
The Status of Women and the Women's Movement
Four important challenges confronted women in Pakistan in the
early 1990s: increasing practical literacy, gaining access to
employment opportunities at all levels in the economy, promoting
change in the perception of women's roles and status, and gaining
a public voice both within and outside of the political process.
There have been various attempts at social and legal reform aimed
at improving Muslim women's lives in the subcontinent during the
twentieth century. These attempts generally have been related
to two broader, intertwined movements: the social reform movement
in British India and the growing Muslim nationalist movement.
Since partition, the changing status of women in Pakistan largely
has been linked with discourse about the role of Islam in a modern
state. This debate concerns the extent to which civil rights common
in most Western democracies are appropriate in an Islamic society
and the way these rights should be reconciled with Islamic family
law.
Muslim reformers in the nineteenth century struggled to introduce
female education, to ease some of the restrictions on women's
activities, to limit polygyny, and to ensure women's rights under
Islamic law. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan convened the Mohammedan Educational
Conference in the 1870s to promote modern education for Muslims,
and he founded the Muhammadan Anglo- Oriental College. Among the
predominantly male participants were many of the earliest proponents
of education and improved social status for women. They advocated
cooking and sewing classes conducted in a religious framework
to advance women's knowledge and skills and to reinforce Islamic
values. But progress in women's literacy was slow: by 1921 only
four out of every 1,000 Muslim females were literate.
Promoting the education of women was a first step in moving beyond
the constraints imposed by purdah. The nationalist struggle helped
fray the threads in that socially imposed curtain. Simultaneously,
women's roles were questioned, and their empowerment was linked
to the larger issues of nationalism and independence. In 1937
the Muslim Personal Law restored rights (such as inheritance of
property) that had been lost by women under the Anglicization
of certain civil laws. As independence neared, it appeared that
the state would give priority to empowering women. Pakistan's
founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said in a speech in 1944:
No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are
side by side with you; we are victims of evil customs. It is a
crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four
walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere
for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.
After independence, elite Muslim women in Pakistan continued
to advocate women's political empowerment through legal reforms.
They mobilized support that led to passage of the Muslim Personal
Law of Sharia in 1948, which recognized a woman's right to inherit
all forms of property. They were also behind the futile attempt
to have the government include a Charter of Women's Rights in
the 1956 constitution. The 1961 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance covering
marriage and divorce, the most important sociolegal reform that
they supported, is still widely regarded as empowering to women.
Two issues--promotion of women's political representation and
accommodation between Muslim family law and democratic civil rights--came
to dominate discourse about women and sociolegal reform. The second
issue gained considerable attention during the regime of Zia ul-Haq
(1977-88). Urban women formed groups to protect their rights against
apparent discrimination under Zia's Islamization program. It was
in the highly visible realm of law that women were able to articulate
their objections to the Islamization program initiated by the
government in 1979. Protests against the 1979 Enforcement of Hudood
Ordinances focused on the failure of hudood (see Glossary) ordinances
to distinguish between adultery (zina) and rape (zina-bil-jabr).
A man could be convicted of zina only if he were actually
observed committing the offense by other men, but a woman could
be convicted simply because she became pregnant.
The Women's Action Forum was formed in 1981 to respond to the
implementation of the penal code and to strengthen women's position
in society generally. The women in the forum, most of whom came
from elite families, perceived that many of the laws proposed
by the Zia government were discriminatory and would compromise
their civil status. In Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad the group
agreed on collective leadership and formulated policy statements
and engaged in political action to safeguard women's legal position.
The Women's Action Forum has played a central role in exposing
the controversy regarding various interpretations of Islamic law
and its role in a modern state, and in publicizing ways in which
women can play a more active role in politics. Its members led
public protests in the mid-1980s against the promulgation of the
Law of Evidence. Although the final version was substantially
modified, the Women's Action Forum objected to the legislation
because it gave unequal weight to testimony by men and women in
financial cases. Fundamentally, they objected to the assertion
that women and men cannot participate as legal equals in economic
affairs.
Beginning in August 1986, the Women's Action Forum members and
their supporters led a debate over passage of the Shariat Bill,
which decreed that all laws in Pakistan should conform to Islamic
law. They argued that the law would undermine the principles of
justice, democracy, and fundamental rights of citizens, and they
pointed out that Islamic law would become identified solely with
the conservative interpretation supported by Zia's government.
Most activists felt that the Shariat Bill had the potential to
negate many of the rights women had won. In May 1991, a compromise
version of the Shariat Bill was adopted, but the debate over whether
civil law or Islamic law should prevail in the country continued
in the early 1990s.
Discourse about the position of women in Islam and women's roles
in a modern Islamic state was sparked by the government's attempts
to formalize a specific interpretation of Islamic law. Although
the issue of evidence became central to the concern for women's
legal status, more mundane matters such as mandatory dress codes
for women and whether females could compete in international sports
competitions were also being argued.
Another of the challenges faced by Pakistani women concerns their
integration into the labor force. Because of economic pressures
and the dissolution of extended families in urban areas, many
more women are working for wages than in the past. But by 1990
females officially made up only 13 percent of the labor force.
Restrictions on their mobility limit their opportunities, and
traditional notions of propriety lead families to conceal the
extent of work performed by women.
Usually, only the poorest women engage in work--often as midwives,
sweepers, or nannies--for compensation outside the home. More
often, poor urban women remain at home and sell manufactured goods
to a middleman for compensation. More and more urban women have
engaged in such activities during the 1990s, although to avoid
being shamed few families willingly admit that women contribute
to the family economically. Hence, there is little information
about the work women do. On the basis of the predominant fiction
that most women do no work other than their domestic chores, the
government has been hesitant to adopt overt policies to increase
women's employment options and to provide legal support for women's
labor force participation.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) commissioned a national
study in 1992 on women's economic activity to enable policy planners
and donor agencies to cut through the existing myths on female
labor-force participation. The study addresses the specific reasons
that the assessment of women's work in Pakistan is filled with
discrepancies and underenumeration and provides a comprehensive
discussion of the range of informal- sector work performed by
women throughout the country. Information from this study was
also incorporated into the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1993-98).
A melding of the traditional social welfare activities of the
women's movement and its newly revised political activism appears
to have occurred. Diverse groups including the Women's Action
Forum, the All-Pakistan Women's Association, the Pakistan Women
Lawyers' Association, and the Business and Professional Women's
Association, are supporting small-scale projects throughout the
country that focus on empowering women. They have been involved
in such activities as instituting legal aid for indigent women,
opposing the gendered segregation of universities, and publicizing
and condemning the growing incidents of violence against women.
The Pakistan Women Lawyers' Association has released a series
of films educating women about their legal rights; the Business
and Professional Women's Association is supporting a comprehensive
project inside Yakki Gate, a poor area inside the walled city
of Lahore; and the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi has promoted
networks among women who work at home so they need not be dependent
on middlemen to acquire raw materials and market the clothes they
produce.
The women's movement has shifted from reacting to government
legislation to focusing on three primary goals: securing women's
political representation in the National Assembly; working to
raise women's consciousness, particularly about family planning;
and countering suppression of women's rights by defining and articulating
positions on events as they occur in order to raise public awareness.
An as yet unresolved issue concerns the perpetuation of a set
number of seats for women in the National Assembly. Many women
activists whose expectations were raised during the brief tenure
of Benazir Bhutto's first government (December 1988-August 1990)
now believe that, with her return to power in October 1993, they
can seize the initiative to bring about a shift in women's personal
and public access to power.
Data as of April 1994
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