Kinship, Patriarchal Structure and Women’s Bargaining with Patriarchy in Rural Sindh, Pakistan

The book provides insights into the prevailing patriarchal system in rural Pakistan. It elaborates on the kinship system in rural Sindh and explores how young married women strategize and negotiate with patriarchy. Drawing on qualitative methodologies, the book reveals the strong relationship between poverty and the perpetuation of patriarchy. Women’s strategies help elevate their position in their families, such as attention to household tasks, producing children, and doing handicraft work for their well-being. These conditions are usually seen as evidence of women’s subordination, but these are also strategies for survival where accommodation to patriarchy wins them approval. The book concludes that women’s life-long struggle is, in fact, a technique of negotiating with patriarchy. In so doing, they internalize the culture that rests on their subordination and reproduce it in older age in exercising power by oppressing other junior women.

Elaborating on gendered power relations in a little-known area of Pakistan, Nadia Agha explores how women in the cultural context of Khairpur actively participate in mitigating their own subordination by ‘playing by the cultural rules’ and hence ensure their economic survival. As poverty and social insecurity are at the foundation of why women must acquiesce to patriarchal control, she shows how they often adopt survival strategies to enable their agency to gain societal approval within prevailing strict patriarchal boundaries. Professor Agha deftly shows that when women make choices to accommodate others, this is often actually a strategy they can use to gain some semblance of power. This is an important contribution to our understanding of choices women make within patriarchy in South Asia and how they can eke out some power by doing so. 

Professor Anita M. Weiss, International Studies, University of Oregon, Author of Interpreting Islam, Modernity and Women’s Rights in Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Countering Violent Extremism in Pakistan: Local Actions, Local Voices (Oxford University Press, 2020) 

In this groundbreaking work on women’s lives in rural Sindh, Nadia Agha examines how patriarchy depends on poverty to sustain itself, and how the poorest women in Sindhi villages grapple with patriarchy in a delicate dance of patience, negotiation and surrender. Agha unravels further patterns within: kinship systems based on blood and underage marriages, a preference for sons that repeats itself throughout generations, and the deliberate halting of girls’ education. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the roots of women’s disempowerment in order to work towards deep and lasting change in Pakistani society."

- Bina Shah, author of Before She Sleeps and A Season For Martyrs

"Dr Agha’s book shines a light on the triple burden women carry in rural South Asia, and provides new occasion to question patriarchy and its multiple limits on everyday choices women can or cannot make. The author studies a complex tapestry of rural tradition, institutional mores, and women's 'bargain' for survival and opportunities in lesser known parts of Pakistan. The interrogation of vulnerability is both rich and timely while the narrative shines a light on women's extraordinary dependence on patriarchal 'approval', inspite of fulfilling their nurturing, productive and social obligations. The book's insights on the hidden care economy defined by women will surely inform the work of rights activists, policy practitioners and academics."

- Sherry Rehman, Pakistani senator, former Pakistani Ambassador to the US, editor of womansplaining

"Nadia Agha's book is an important addition to the scholarship of gender studies in Pakistan. It is both an insightful study of Pakistani patriarchal form, and women's strategic encounter with an inherently oppressive structure where poverty, illiteracy, and low status is produced and sustained. The book makes a subtle argument about how women negotiate, bargain and expand their space and agency in the spheres of domestic work, and in daily tasks within and not outside these patriarchal structures. The involvement of material culture of crafts where women's creative assets and their accompanying economic benefit adding to their prestige and status provides yet another layer to the bargaining system shaped by women. Women's own eventual power ironically stems from shifting roles within patriarchal order timelines which offers an opportunity for assertion of authority at a later stage."

- Nafisa Shah, Member of the National Assembly, Pakistan, author of Honour Unmasked: Gender Violence, Law, and Power in Pakistan

Dr. Nadia Agha is Associate Professor in Sociology at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. She has a doctorate in Women’s Studies from the University of York, England. Her recent work has been published in the Asian Journal of Social Science, Journal of Research in Gender Studies, Health Education and Journal of International Women’s Studies.