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Diary of a Feminist: The Surprising Casualties of Catastrophe

When a marriage falls apart, who suffers? Either of the spouses, logically. The woman, most prob­ably. But there are times when logic fails in our peculiar social scenario.

When I saw Aapa lately, I was dumb struck. She looked like a ghost of her former self. From a plump, hefty woman she had been reduced to a skeleton. Dark circles had made her eyes sunk deep in her shriveled face. Her skin had broken into a rash and her body itched from eczema — a long suppressed ailment that re-surfaced with a ferocity.

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Diary of a Feminist: The Ties That Bind

There is something get­ting on my nerves day by day: it’s hypocrisy in our society and our life. Above all, in familial relation­ships. It makes me sick and I dread the day when it would rob me completely of my trust and pride and good feelings I have for the ‘family’.

The ‘family’ of the East has been so glorified and its accounts so studded with adjectives like ‘love’, ‘warmth’, ‘cohesiveness’, ‘stability’, etc., that it’s almost a sacrilege to point out any flaws, glar­ing or subtle. You can only talk about ‘the good’ and dare not contemplate ‘the bad and the ugly’.

And the last thing you can question is the parent-child rela­tionship.

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Diary of a Feminist: Idle Husbands

Of all the misfortunes that befall women in our society I think the hardest is an idle husband. A husband who doesn’t work, doesn’t earn, doesn’t do home chores, and neither does he go away and leave the woman (and kids) alone. A woman stuck with such a husband is in a quandary.

An idle husband (nikthatto shauher) is not an uncommon phenomenon in our society. Women suffer in silence ac­cepting their condition as fate. They know the treat­ment of this diseased situa­tion is divorce. But they don’t want a divorce because of the stigma attached.

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Diary of a Feminist: Men’s Distrust of Men

“In women,” Bertrand Russell said, “zest has been greatly diminished by a mistaken concept of respectability”.

Zest is an in-born human capacity to enjoy life, to be interested in the world and the varied and the beauti­ful things it has to offer. In our society, I think, this basic human instinct is, to a large extent, killed in wo­men not only by a mista­ken concept of respectabil­ity but also by a distrust of men inculcated in women by men themselves.

Take for instance travelling. Not till very late, a wo­man’s going out of her house for pleasure was considered a horrible, ignoble act. Times have definitely changed. The women who have the op­portunity and desire to travel in-land or abroad, do travel. Still, by and large, conven­tional thinking persists — that it’s dangerous for girls to travel unless they are duly chaperoned. Girls who do travel may have to face raised eyebrows and sarcastic remarks.

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Diary of a Feminist: Understanding Polygamy

The concept (and practice) of taking up to four wives has always intri­gued me. Rather, enraged me. I always thought irritatingly, ‘Well, if a man can take four wives why can’t a woman take four husbands?’

As I grew up and delved further into the question I realised the complexity of the issue and naivety of my stand: polyandry is no answer to polygamy. Telling the kid one’s not sure who his father is among the four guys is as confusing as the disclosure that the poor soul has got four mothers (one real, three step)!

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Diary of a Feminist: The Intricacies of Unhappiness

If you believe in fate, you would ascribe unhappiness that abounds in people’s life to fate and no­thing else. ‘They are fated to be unhappy, to be miser­able’, you tell yourself. But if you are not such an abso­lute fatalist, you’d start wondering if it’s human beings themselves who br­ing unhappiness unto their lives.

When I think about them — Azhar Bhai, approach­ing 40, married two years back and now father of a son, Saira Aapa, his sister, a divorcee, in her early 40s and their ailing, widowed mother — I ask myself “Why have they always been such unhappy people?

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Diary of a Feminist: The Gentlewomen Callers

How shall I begin? The same old story — the quaint ritual of match-­making that goes on in our society. Well, if you are a woman and single too, the subject is emotionally charged, especially so if you belong to a bourgeoisie set-up where your parents and you have no way out but to allow people — prospective mothers-in-law, to be exact — to come and have a look at you.

Perhaps at this stage of my life I can talk about it with ease. All the emotions and the rage have gone out of it. The mist has dissolved and I can see clearly now. Or so I think.

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Diary of a Feminist: Women and Sports

Previously published on 20th October, 1983

 The other day a friend of mine and I were talking about women and sports. She said, “I’m not in favour of women jumping, shaking, running, exhibiting their bodies in front of men.”

I was a bit surprised at her attitude. Yet, I wasn’t worked up. Personally, I am not in­terested in sports. I have this attitude towards sport: ‘If somebody wants to play, let her/him play. And leave me alone.’

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Women and Children in Prison: A Study of Three Prisons in Sindh, Pakistan (2003)

This research report was written for the Association of the Business, Professional and Agricultural Women (ABPAW) in November 2003. 

This report includes the study of three prisons in Sindh, Pakistan, namely, Special Prison for Women, Larkana, Women Ward, Sukkur Prison II and the Juvenile Cell, Sukkur Prison II.

Click the link below to view the full report:

Women and Children in Prison

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Women Workers in Textile/Readymade Garments Sector in Pakistan and Bangladesh: A Report (2009)

This research report was written as a project undertaken by Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) in collaboration with South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE) and was published in 2009.

This brief paper attempts to investigate the status of women workers in textile/apparel industries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and explore the extent of mobilization and organization of women workers in the context of weakened trade unionism in the two countries. The study seeks to analyze the nature and extent of women’s contestation of barriers
and negotiation of space as defined through the institutionalized mechanisms of control and cultural barriers in the Muslim societies of the two countries.

Click the link below to view the full report:

Women Workers in Textile/Readymade Garments Sector in Pakistan and Bangladesh