From DAWN.com
They are the hardy flowers of an uncertain spring. Pakistani women are one half of a country that is unsure about their value, reluctant to invest in their welfare and ready to relegate them to the margins.
In this year 2014, against the unraveling saga of talks with the Taliban, lapsed literacy rates, inattention and apathy; Pakistani women continue to persevere. This year, like so many recent ones, they continue to push their way into unwelcome public spaces, fight for equality in private ones, and claim their country for their own.
It is a difficult battle, in numbers a little over a third can expect to enroll in secondary school and more than half will have no education at all. Each one will give birth to an average four babies, and less than half will get any medical care while pregnant. Too many will die in the dangerous process of giving life.
The challenge of the Pakistani woman is one of survival, of persevering against odds perhaps unseen by women of any other country. Looking back at the defining moments in the Pakistani woman’s story then, is an exercise in constructing the history of resilience; a parallel history of achievements and milestones often ignored amid the more pressing, more urgent and more prominent demands of histories written by men.
Equality before existence
One defining moment for Pakistani women took place before Pakistan itself was an actuality. In 1932, the All India Muslim League, which counted many strong women among its ranks met and passed a resolution giving women complete equality in politics.
At the occasion, the founder to-be of Pakistan, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah said the following words,
No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you; we are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable conditions in which our women have to live.
Saying these words over a decade before Pakistan became a reality, perhaps the Quaid-e-Azam hoped, the creation for a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims would also mean the liberation of its Muslim women.
