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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.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Rural Pakistani Women in Context: Patriarchy and Poverty.- Chapter 3: Exploring Rural Women's Lives: Methodological Choices and Challenges.- Chapter 4: Kinship in Rural Sindh: Forms of Marriage and Their Consequences for Women.- Chapter 5: Household Work: Exploitation and Negotiation.- Chapter 6: Household Power Structure and Women's Negotiation with Patriarchy.- Chapter 7: Women's Negotiation and Bargaining with Patriarchy: A Game of Patience.- Chapter 8: Conclusion.
About the author
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.
Report
"The book offers a thorough and insightful analysis ... . Agha s book provides new insights into the impact of patriarchy in rural Pakistan ... . The book emphasises the importance of education, economic independence, and social support networks in empowering women and challenging local and global feminist narratives. It is essential reading for scholars and practitioners interested in gender, feminism, development, and sociology. Furthermore, it offers hope and strategies for change in patriarchal contexts. Therefore, it should be widely read." (Sadiq Bhanbhro, Feminist Encounters - A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Vol. 9 (1), 2025)
