Uneducated and Unhealthy: The Plight of Women in Pakistan

The title of this paper is self-explanatory. It discusses underinvestment in female education and health and the deleterious effects this has on not only women themselves but on the future generation which women bring forth and nourish. This underinvestment is more pronounced in the rural areas of Pakistan where the bulk of the population resides and where low levels of education, lack of awareness and access to medical facilities pose a major threat to the development of a healthy and productive society. Combining macro-level data on population growth rates, female mortality and literacy with two micro-level studies based on extensive participant observation and in-depth interviewing in two Punjabi villages, the data presented in the paper aims to sensitise the readers of the realities of women's social existance and of the complexities of female neglect specifically in terms of education and health. The paper also highlights some of the dominant cultural notions regarding women which become instrumental in hampering women's access to education, information and other structures of power. The confinement of women to narrow domestic and powerless domains has far-reaching and negative consequences of which statistics portray a picture

The Cultural Context of Women's Productive Invisibility: A Case Study of a Pakistani Village

This paper shows that women in Rajpur, a Punjabi village in Pakistan, participate substantially in activities that are productive and are geared directly or indirectly towards producing utilities of some kind. These utilities are both income-generating and/or expenditure-saving. Women are extensively involved in many agricultural and livestock-tending operations, in addition to their involvement in other productive domains such as poultry-tending, processing of dairy products, and handicrafts. Whereas men are working in the city to earn extra cash, women too, are working in pursuit of the same goal. However, women's involvement in these activities remains relatively unrecognised within larger cultural pictures and has not resulted in elevating their status within society. Despite women's productive activities, they are largely projected as domestic and private beings and their roles as home-makers, mothers, and nurturers of children have come to be culturally emphasised to the exclusion of all others. The institutions of purdah and segregation of sexes which confine women and their activities to the private domains and permit men access to the public domains act as effective cultural devices in creating blinders to women's productive roles. This paper contends that the existing dominant cultural images of women and the invisibility of their productive dimensions reflect social values rather than social reality.

Cultural Perceptions and the Productive Roles of Rural Pakistani Women

In most societies, women have been defined largely in terms of their maternal and caretaking roles and hence been stereotyped as "domestics". Epstein (1986); Ortner (1974); Reiter (1975); Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974); Rogers (1979) and Nelson (1974) argue that the roles that females take have been viewed as relatively oflesser significance in larger cultural pictures. Male as opposed to female activities have always been recognised as being more important and cultural systems have given authority to the roles of men and have portrayed them as being of greater value. Anthropology, in the past, has also followed in the same evaluations and greater attention has been given to the documentation of male activities which constitute the "public" life of the culture and are therefore more visible to the researchers. As a result the "private/domestic" spheres where women are involved have been downgraded. All this has led to impoverished ethnographic accounts, and to a number of misconceptions regarding female values, contributions and activities. Rogers (1979) states