CAPTIVE TO ARCHAIC TRADITIONS

by Marfua Tokhtakhodzhaeva, director of the Women's Resource Center, Tashkent

In relation to gender, contemporary society in both the East and the West is in transition from traditional forms of patriarchy based on subordinating and controlling women, to fraternal gender relations oriented to partnership between men and women. The official foundation of these new relations is juridical recognition of women's right to citizenship with equal rights.

In reality, the world over, the process of transition from patriarchy to gender equality is difficult and uneven. To create contemporary civil institutions, post-colonial countries first of all have to overcome the burden of the past in social consciousness. Since 1992 [the start of the post-Soviet era] the dominance of the traditional sector has emerged ever more clearly and the secularization of society is threatened. We now have a paradoxical situation, not fully grasped by today's governing elite and not analyzed by its ideologists. Government policy has facilitated the ideological support of religion, yet the development of the economy and of society requires displacing religion from public life and limiting its influence on the inner mental-spiritual life of the individual, and this contradicts the all-encompassing doctrine of Islam.

The political policy of secularizing society and developing a modern contemporary sector evokes the hidden dissatisfaction (which existed in Soviet times) from traditional society, and its radical wing - the illegal religious-political movement - accuses the government of disbelief. The condition of women is the foremost indicator of the contradiction between Islam and political nation-building. Revitalizing elements of women's segregation, for example the wearing of the hijab, and limiting women's role to the family circle and the raising of children, have considerable support in traditional sectors of society, but are resisted by contemporary society.

It is hard to imagine how acute this problem is, of the influence of custom and ritual on the situation of women. The abundance of these customs and rituals is a heavy burden on the family's well being and on the physical and spiritual health of women. This burden has a high cost in systematically increasing the unpaid labor of women; it drains their time and energy on unproductive tasks, so that they have less for bringing up their children, not to speak of their own self-development and fulfillment. The traditional way of socializing women programs their path from marriage to death and any effort to break away from this path often backfires and ends in the woman and her family living ostracized by the mahalla [the Uzbek community].

The harsh observance of custom does not allow most women to take part in the modern sector of the economy and to increase her income, thereby leaving her marginalized. And this marginalized status makes her very dependent. To gain the approval of those around her, she submits and follows all the traditions, rules and norms. Thus does woman become at once the victim and the means of reproducing tradition. As historical experience demonstrates, authority and tradition are the regulators of social relations. What unites the Uzbek family and community is that the actions of each person is determined first of all by the interests of the family, and secondly by the interests of the community.

Therefore the responsibility of each individual is to family and community norms and does not extend to a wider social community, such as the whole country. The priority of tradition over law functions both on the family level and the community level. In women's upbringing absolute obedience to the will of parents has special significance, and after marriage, to the will of the husband. This often leads to a mindless existence, because the traditional patriarchal distribution of roles is that the husband is the breadwinner and has to provide the family with all its needs - food, clothing, household goods. The wife has to be satisfied with all this and make the best use of it, in cooking, laundering, and serving everyone. If she is trained in a craft or trade, she may practice it, but her earnings do not influence her status in the family - she must hand them over to her mother-in-law who then returns some portion to her for personal needs. Divorce and other forms of protest against beatings by her husband or oppression by her mother-in-law is condemned by public opinion, and the woman, also under pressure from her own parents, has to resign herself to the existing order of things. Even in case of suicide, the woman is deemed not normal or mentally unbalanced.

[The author writes about the hierarchy of authority in the family and community and about other ways of controlling women, for example, through traditional dress and the practice of parents choosing a husband for their daughter.]

The emancipation of the eastern women and the rise in the educational level of women in Central Asia, incomparably greater that in the pre-revolutionary period, took place under strong pressure exerted by the government on society, and of course this was an achievement of the Soviet system. The relapses that took place point to the weakness of the Soviet way of modernization by which that achievement was reached. It explains today's success of the traditionalists, who without any opposition from society are returning women to their traditional role as "second sex." We will thoroughly analyze the position of the Uzbek woman in the family and we will expose the tendencies in the post-Soviet period. Unfortunately, today's protest against traditionalism hardly figures in works of literature and art. One exception is a sad song by the well-known singer Ravshana Kamilova. In "I love Ozoda" we are given in three minutes a whole drama of two young people in love, two classmates, whose first pure love is squashed by their parents. This is not an anachronism, but a normal occurrence these days. The will of parents, often very educated ones, allegedly wanting happiness for their child, cruelly destroys the feelings and dreams of the young, and the parents' fear of "what will people say" turns out to be stronger than the happiness of their children.

In Uzbekistan where patriarchal consciousness rules, achieving gender equality is possible if the government takes adequate measures on behalf of women, and if there develops a mass women's movement in defense of their rights. We can certify that legislation is not sufficient protection for women's rights in the event of widespread legal non-acceptance of equality [by the legal profession]. In that situation, government measures by themselves are not enough.