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Tajikistan
Gender and Family Structure
The Soviet era saw the implementation of policies designed to
transform the status of women. During the 1930s, the Soviet authorities
launched a campaign for women's equality in Tajikistan, as they
did elsewhere in Central Asia. Eventually major changes resulted
from such programs, but initially they provoked intense public
opposition. For example, women who appeared in public without
the traditional all-enveloping veil were ostracized by society
or even killed by relatives for supposedly shaming their families
by what was considered unchaste behavior.
World War II brought an upsurge in women's employment outside
the home. With the majority of men removed from their civilian
jobs by the demands of war, women compensated for the labor shortage.
Although the employment of indigenous women in industry continued
to grow even after the war, they remained a small fraction of
the industrial labor force after independence. In the early 1980s,
women made up 51 percent of Tajikistan's population and 52 percent
of the work force on collective farms, but only 38 percent of
the industrial labor force, 16 percent of transportation workers,
14 percent of communications workers, and 28 percent of civil
servants. (These statistics include women of Russian and other
non-Central Asian nationalities.) In some rural parts of the republic,
about half the women were not employed at all outside the home
in the mid-1980s. In the late Soviet era, female underemployment
was an important political issue in Tajikistan because it was
linked to the Soviet propaganda campaign portraying Islam as a
regressive influence on society.
The issue of female employment was more complicated than was
indicated by Soviet propaganda, however. Many women remained in
the home not only because of traditional attitudes about women's
roles but also because many lacked vocational training and few
child care facilities were available. By the end of the 1980s,
Tajikistan's preschools could accommodate only 16.5 percent of
the children of appropriate age overall and only 2.4 percent of
the rural children. Despite all this, women provided the core
of the work force in certain areas of agriculture, especially
the production of cotton and some fruits and vegetables. Women
were underrepresented in government and management positions relative
to their proportion of the republic's population. The Communist
Party of Tajikistan, the government (especially the higher offices),
and economic management organizations were largely directed by
men.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, Tajik social norms
and even de facto government policy still often favored a traditionalist,
restrictive attitude toward women that tolerated wife beating
and the arbitrary dismissal of women from responsible positions.
In the late Soviet period, Tajik girls still commonly married
while under age despite official condemnation of this practice
as a remnant of the "feudal" Central Asian mentality.
Tajik society never has been organized by tribal affiliation.
The core of the traditional social structure of Tajiks and other
sedentary peoples of Central Asia is usually the extended family,
which is composed of an adult couple, their unmarried daughters,
and their married sons and their wives and children. Such a group
normally has joint ownership of the family homestead, land, crops,
and livestock. The more prosperous a family, the more members
it is likely to have. In the 1930s, some particularly wealthy
Tajik families had fifty members or more. Although Islam permits
polygamy, that practice has been illegal in Tajikistan for about
seventy years; monogamy is the more typical form of spousal relationship
because of the high bride-price traditionally required of suitors.
Traditional family ties remain strong. Tajikistan had one of
the highest percentages of people living in families rather than
singly in the Soviet Union. According to the 1989 census, 69 percent
of the men aged sixteen or older and 67 percent of the women in
that age group were married, 2 percent of the men and 10 percent
of the women were widowers or widows, and 1.7 percent of the men
and 4 percent of the women were divorced or separated. Only 7.5
percent of men over age forty and 0.4 percent of women over forty
never had been married.
The strength of the family is sometimes misinterpreted as simply
a consequence of Islam's influence on Tajik society. However,
rural societies in general often emphasize the family as a social
unit, and Islam does not forbid divorce. Grounds for divorce in
Tajikistan include childlessness, emotional estrangement (in some
cases the result of arranged marriages), a shortage of housing,
drunkenness, and economic dissatisfaction. The highest rate of
divorce is in Dushanbe, which has not only an acute housing shortage
but a large number of inhabitants belonging to non-Central Asian
nationalities. Marriage across nationality lines is relatively
uncommon. Ethnically mixed marriages are almost twice as likely
to occur in urban as in rural areas.
Data as of March 1996
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