Women in Pakistan

Iram Nisa Asif

Women in Pakistan have marked their presence in public spaces since the 1950s.
Whether in circumscribed spaces for women or gender-mixed spaces, Pakistani
women are increasingly participating in public debates and have become more visible
in national discourses. The national public sphere in Pakistan is important in this
regard because it serves as a theatrical stage for political performance, where
women and men across ethnic, class, and ideological lines have orchestrated acts of
protest and performed as agents of social change. This is a platform contested and
shared by political parties, social movements, and grassroots organizations.
Rhetorically skilled and activist women use the national public sphere as a political
stage to promote their emergent causes in front of local as well as global audiences.
Particularly in urban sectors, women have demonstrated their demands for justice and
condemned institutional violence against women through street mobilization, public
assemblies (jalsa), print journalism, and TV media. Most effectively, using methods
of collective mobilization, women in Pakistan have claimed a female voice in maledominated discourses by seizing upon public places and spaces: the scene of the street
as disseminated by the media. With this in view, both Islamic and secular women can
be seen as proactive agents in the national public sphere, exposing the limits of the
political and linking the spectacular and theatrical with their claims to authority as
they critique corruption, nepotism, and inequality in society and in the state apparatus.
Ideologically apart, Islamic women use religious tradition as a means to reach their
political ends whereas secular women use UN-sanctioned human rights to voice a
consistent criticism against ideas and practices of gender bias. Pakistani women have
thus contested the national public sphere among themselves and with their male
counterpartsthey have used it successfully to create a national focus and attract
global attention to their demands. While outspoken women have created public
awareness around cultural, social, political, and legal subjects related to the status of
women and/or their own identities in private and public, middle-class and workingclass women have performed quotidian roles in a broad spectrum of social, cultural,

and work spaces. Additionally, the urbanization schemes of the major cities of
Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, along with the administrative reform in 1972,
opened up positions for secretarial work in government services, in the
nongovernmental organization sector, and in other such white-collar occupations.
The boom of media enterprise continues to add new avenues in broadcasting and
journalismmodern jobs that Pakistani women compete for. There are female
academics with prominent profiles, as well some outstanding women politicians
(there is a quota for women in the National Assembly of Pakistan). Whether in sight,
leading public exposs in political arenas, or out of sight, in novel workspaces, the
actions of Pakistani women demonstrate how cultural conventions of exposure and
discourses on domesticity, and thus ideals of womanhood, have taken new forms and
continue to change with time. The perception of Pakistani women as only domestic
daughters, sisters, and wives who act in the private sphere, circumscribed by purdah
(seclusion) norms, is thus changing. In the early twenty-first century Pakistani women
are actively engaged in the fields of philanthropy, politics, governance, religion, law,
activism, human rights, education, sports, literature, music, arts, fashion, and, most
popularly, in the media.
Since 1999, the year in which the army chief Pervez Musharraf (r. 19992008) seized
power via a nonviolent coup, the media landscape in Pakistan has seen a dramatic
change. Musharraf opened up the airways to a free and independent media when he
issued countless TV licenses his predecessors had vehemently blocked. GEO
broadcast was among the first TV channels. It moved its headquarters from Dubai to
Lahore and competed for audiences with the state-governed channel, Pakistan
Television Corporation (PTV), which had been broadcasting news and religious and
social programs to the public since 1964. Following in its trail, more than forty-five
private TV channels mushroomed alongside print newspapers in more than eleven
languages. This explosion of broadcast media outlets and subsequently new media
spaces, such as YouTube, heralded the emergence of a new mediatized public sphere
where social, political, and human rights activistsmen and women alike
articulated counter-discourses to state-sponsored rhetoric. In particular, urbaneducated Pakistani youth have become proactive in social media, exploiting the
opportunity to develop new modes of critical expression. Feminist critics, journalists,

and writers have published their writings in the press and mediafor example the
journalist Razia Bhatti (19441996) was a critic who broke many taboosmaking
TV journalism and broadcasting a platform for engagement, criticism, and
contestation. Often TV journalists take up the role of moral crusaders advocating for
public ethics and attacking discrimination and corruption. They also employ the
media to transmit local events to a global audience. Countless foundations, networks,
and resources for Pakistani journalists have materialized as part of the rapid
development in modern media communication, predominantly in the urban
landscapesome exclusively directed at women, such as the Women Media Center
(WMC). WMC, founded by the feminist journalist Fauzia Shaheen, is a nonprofit
organization that works toward creating a professional and unbiased environment to
empower and increase women's presence in the media via training and workshop
participation. The key objective of the organization is to create visible and competent
female newsmakersboth as sources and subjects of news.
Women parliamentarians working for state power and influence are prominent in
mediatized discourses. There is a higher number of women in parliament than the
constitutionally imparted quota; women across political parties possessed altogether
91 out of 342 seats in the National Assembly after the 2008 electionthe highest
representation of women in the country's history. In comparison, the 1988 elections
elected only eight women to the National Assembly. Moreover, after 2008 five
women have assumed positions at the federal level and as ministers of state. This
indicates that the visibility of women in the polity and legislature has increased and is
increasing, despite the apparent rise of Islamism in the country.
Not limited to state politics, women in diverse political and social public domains also
manifest their interests, needs, resistance, and collective mobilizations against
discrimination and hegemonic power. Indeed, the role of Pakistani women is shifting
national politics as new aspects of participation and public representations are
structured within and around women's agency. This has been true of the rising
political engagement, visibility, and achievements of women from the upper classes,
but is now increasingly so also for the middle classes, who associate the status of
Pakistani women with that of progress and democracy, manifested in the supreme
symbol of Pakistan's first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto (19532007), first

elected in 1988.
Even prior to Benazir Bhutto, however, a series of women pioneered political
discourses and were engaged in Pakistan's nation-building project. Women's role has
been, and still is, enmeshed in Pakistani nationhood, idealized in cultural
performances (as daughters, sisters, and mothers who preserve honor and respect,
balancing domestic duties with public engagement) and cultural clothing (ideally with
a light chiffon scarf on the head to demonstrate respect for tradition). Their public
involvement necessitated symbols of modest conduct and dress codes immersed in
new combinations of representation with respect to so-called traditional values and
domestic awarenesswhether in rural or urban areas. Tradition in this way is an
essential part of facilitating changes and engaging in complex ways in political
strategizing.
After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, women from the upper and upper-middle
classes (often wives of political leaders) participated in the birth of national politics,
legislation, and representation. In particular, the public face of Fatimah Jinnah (1893
1967), the sister of the nation's founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (18761948),
was seen to connote strength in support of a nation in the making. Fatimah Jinnah ran
for presidency in the 1965 elections with support from the conservative religious
movement Jamat-i Islm, but her opponent, Ayub Khan (r. 19581969), defeated
her. Nationally and internationally recognized Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan (1905
1990), the wife of Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan (18961951), held
several state positions; among others, she was the first female ambassador to the
Netherlands, Italy, and Tunisia from 1954 to 1963. Later, in 1973, she was appointed
as the first female governor of Sindh Province. Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan also
established the All Pakistan Women's Association (APWA) in 1949, whose members
were mainly drawn from the minority elite. It was a serious and collective attempt to
improve women's status in society and was state sponsored until 1977. APWA hosted
welfare projects for low-income women in both rural and urban areas, predominantly
in the fields of education, health, social rights, and law. This image and the welfare
work of do-good begums were an essential aspect of the nation-building project in
the early years. They articulated discourses of anticolonial nationalism and the
integration of migrants (muhjir) coming from India. Thus, both Fatimah Jinnah and

Begum Rana Liaquat Khan figured as symbols of motherhood: Madar-e-Millat

(Mother of the Nation).
Another influential group, the Women's Action Forum (WAF), was formed in 1981.
A secular feminist movement shaped within a liberal framework of religious tolerance
and freedom, its founders were educated activists who contested a series of women's
predicaments and Islamic laws that discriminated in favor of men, such as the udd
punishments introduced by the general Zia ul-Haq (r. 19771988) in 1979. Using the
national public sphere as an arena for political performance, WAF women took to the
streets and demonstrated against legal injunctions oppressing women and denying
their rights. The legislation of the Muslim Family Law Ordinance (1961), the Hudood
Ordinance (1979), the Law of Evidence (1984), and the Law of Qi (retribution)
and Diyt (blood money) (1985) has been under immense criticism from Pakistani
feminists and human rights activists. All four laws do not protect women's legal rights
vis--vis menon the contrary, they institutionalize the devaluation of women. In
cases of testimony, inheritance, marriage, or guardianship of children, the legislation
prevents women from exercising their fundamental rights on equal terms with men.
For example, in cases of financial transactions, the testimony of two women equals
that of one man, and in cases of rape the evidence of four righteous Muslim men is
needed to prove that adultery has not taken place and that a sexual attack was in fact
rape. In particular, the Hudood Ordinance, in which the distinction between rape and
adultery is blurred, has been the subject of constant criticism. WAF also defended the
right of sportswomen to participate in the Asian Games. During the military
government of General Zia ul-Haq women were banned from spectator sports as a
result of an androcentric religious lobby that considered women's participation in
sports as obscene. However, since the mid-1990s, women have become increasingly
visible in national and regional sports fields; in team-oriented performances; and as
individual performers in cricket, football, tennis, squash, badminton, swimming,
skiing, mountain climbing, cycling, and running, where women set new directions for
emerging currents of change. Since the first women's cricket team was assembled in
1996 by Shaiza and Sharmeen Khan, young Pakistani women have been inspired and
encouraged to ignore criticism from orthodox religious groups. However, limited
funds for women's sports have made it extremely difficult for Pakistani women to
qualify for international sports competition.

In contrast to the secular WAF, young Islamist women in the cross-gendered

seminary-mosque movement Jamia HafsaLal Masjid (Seminary HafsaRed Mosque)
are a contemporary example of how female religious actors have contested and
performed in the national public sphere. The movement first came into the limelight
through national media in early 2007. Reportedly seven thousand adolescent girls,
young women, female teachers, and students from Jamia Hafsa assembled in the
courtyard of the Red Mosque on 28 January 2007 in Islamabad to protest against
seven mosque demolitions in the capital. More broadly, the movement was agitating
for Islamic revivalism and Islamic legalization in the social, political, and legal
institutions of Pakistan. As an essential part of the scene, all students and teachers
were dressed in black burqa uniforms (long female kaftan dresses that include head
and face covers), while the adolescent girls, modestly dressed with pastel-colored
scarves over their head, lined up in row after row behind their leaders. Local
Pakistanis, regardless of religious conviction, were appalled by this urban female face
of Islamism, not only because they perceived the burqa as an imported alien dress
code by contrast to their own shalwar kamiz (trouser and tunic), but also because
religion had taken a radical form in which women replicated androcentric Islamist
discourses in the public sphere. The authorities ignored the powerful and intimidating
public representation of women from Jamia Hafsa and their demands for a system
change based on religious tenets. They responded with a military operation,
however, as the movement sought to alter what its members perceived to be rampant
social change in their immediate local community, overtly attacking un-Islamic
activities and un-Islamic places in Islamabad. Young Islamist women took part in
moral crusades in public spacesand equally encouraged other religiously ethically
minded Muslim men and women (ghairat-mand) to do the sameprecipitating a
vigilante movement of Sharah enforcement (Nifazat-e-sharah) in the country. In
the discourses of Jamia Hafsa the notion of ghairat applies to ethical shame or
ethical consciousness directed by religion. The idea of ghairat, generically meaning
honor, jealousy, courage, modesty, and shame, is enacted in various cultural contexts,
often in relation to women's modesty and sexuality. It is a complex concept that
applies to both men and women. Motivated by ghairat, the movement violated the
law as members occupied the national children's library of the city, kidnapped a local
prostitute, and forced film and music shops to shut down, burning their DVDs and
CDs alleged to contain sinful music, women's dancing and singing, or displays of

immodest sexuality.
Regardless of background and ideology, and despite their visibility in the national
public sphere, one has to keep in mind that women in Pakistan face disproportionate
hurdles in achieving success. Access to power in Pakistan is structured around social
background and family names. The distribution of welfare, education, power, and
privilege as preconditions for social mobility is still highly unequal. While the
deterioration in the status of the majority of rural and lower-class women continues,
politically or financially endowed women have increasingly progressed in activities at
the state and grassroots levels, in national and international arenas. In a complex and
gender-organized society like Pakistan, however, women must still contend with
prejudice and patriarchal perceptions, regardless of social background and social
status. These construct cultural boundaries and maintain systematic modes of
subordination that either marginalize women in subtle ways or in more overt and
brutal ways. Furthermore, institutional discrimination toward women still persists and
takes different forms both in rural and urban configurations: in the house, the society,
or the state, women at some level encounter the face of a structurally entrenched
androcracy. Pakistan remains in many respects a patriarchal feudal society, typified
by traditions that authorize men to keep their families daughters, sisters, and wives
within either close kinship or domestic proximity. Such traditions provide a set of
rules, perceptions, and behaviors to govern, inculcate, and reproduce sharply distinct
gender roles in culturally structured ideologies and practices