Purdah and Poverty in Pakistan

Abstract

This chapter examines purdah as an institution that controls and governs women’s lives in Pakistan, both as an ideology that, through internalised behaviour codes, predetermines a woman’s options and actions, and as a set of externally enforced rules of gender segregation and female seclusion. It explores the impact of purdah on women’s access to economic resources and employment opportunities, and suggests that in urban areas the social organisation of space, combined with the distancing of skill acquisition and workplaces from the homestead, have intensified the negative repercussions purdah has on women’s earning ability. The chapter focuses on the worst victims of the system (namely women who, caught between the ‘respectability’ imperatives of purdah and the need to earn, end up as home-based pieceworkers), and looks at the ways in which purdah contributes to their exploitation.