Uzbek Traditions Continue to Restrict Women’s Roles to Family Alone, Khalikova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 31 – Women can play a key even transforming role in traditional societies, as the Bolsheviks recognized and as the late Gregory Massell documented in his 1974 study, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929 (Princeton, 1974).

            But in the absence of government efforts to emancipate women, traditions in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia remain so strong that women continue to be forced to subordinate their activities to those of their parents, brothers and husbands and thus are deprived of a chance to realize their own goals, Nodira Khalikova says.

             From the moment they are born, Uzbek women are raised to support others rather than promote themselves, the Uzbek commentator says; and while they are pleased to do the former, many feel more than a little bitterness that they are not allowed to pursue their own goals and be helped in that regard (hook.report/2020/07/glavnoye-prabilno-vospitat/).

            “As a result of traditions,” Khalikova writes, “we are preparing our children for life in an Uzbek society” in such a way that gender roles “are predetermined. From their earliest years, we teach our daughters that it is absolutely normal to neglect one’s own interests in order to help mother in the kitchen or prepare meals for a brother.”

            As they grow up, Uzbek girls come to assume that there is no other way. They are forced to marry early, before 25 at the latest lest they be viewed as “old maids” when they are 28 or 30.  And they are told to defer to their mothers and then their husbands no matter how they are treated and what they want because tradition and the family require it.

           

            What is striking and unfortunate is that no one ever tells Uzbek boys the same thing. They are told to pursue their dreams and that their wives and daughters will do everything to support them, even to the point of giving up on their rights and aspirations as individuals, the commentator continues.

            The government reinforces this now with schools offering courses like “The Sense of the Homeland” which elevate the family to the key building block of the state and make women responsible for holding it together regardless of their interests and regardless of how they are treated by their husbands and his relatives.

            In her classic book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir observed that “women are not born: they are raised to be what they are.”  In Uzbekistan, they are being raised to be servants of their families and husbands rather than to be independent individuals.  And that is a tragedy for them and for Uzbek society as a whole.

            Indeed, Khalikova says, any society that tells girls and women that being able to cook is more important than having the chance to read books is sending the wrong message and one that holds both women and the society back. But that is exactly what Uzbek families and the Uzbek state are doing to this day.

            Uzbekistan has many strong women who could accomplish so much more if they weren’t constantly being told that they must focus on the family and defer to their husbands and children even if that means that they have to give up any chance of achieving their own goals, she concludes.