Although mothers hoped for sons, they also wel-
comed daughters who, from a young age, could
help their mothers. By the time a girl became a
young teenager, she might be doing most of the
household work. Mothers and daughters often
remained close throughout the years.
A young woman was expected to focus her life on
her children. Mothers shouldered the responsibili-
ties of raising and training their children. If children
did not turn out well, people tended to point to the
mother, even suggesting that the children had taken
in bad characteristics along with their mother’s
milk.
A young bride usually faced a mother-in-law
who strategized to retain the affection and devo-
tion of her son. Mothers often took a large part in
choosing wives for their sons. It was generally
assumed that they would look for submissive
brides who would obey and work well for them.
Because of their close attachment to her children,
women in unhappy or violent marriages were liable
to feel trapped and unable to leave. Custody laws
favored the father. If a woman remarried, her new
husband would not be willing to support children
from her previous marriage. Also, a mother would
worry about leaving her children under the care of
a stepmother. Children could thus become a chain
binding mothers in an unhappy and restrictive mar-
ital situation.
Given this attachment, the death of a child could
also bring down upon mothers the greatest tragedy
and unbearable sorrow of loss. During the 1980–8
Iran-Iraq War and the 25 years of war in Afghan-
istan, mothers suffered terribly on behalf of chil-
dren injured, frightened, living in privation, or
killed. With the death of sons, widowed women,
particularly in poverty ridden Afghanistan, lost
their means of support and usually became ex-
tremely poor.
Although women were expected to bear children
starting from nine months after the wedding and
then continue to do so, upon reaching the period of
life when her children had married, pregnancy
often brought embarrassment to a mother because
it testified to ongoing sexual relations, deemed
unseemly for older females.
Until the last two or three decades, except in very
well-off and modernized families, older widowed
mothers lived with their children. Homes for the
elderly did not exist.
In the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with the more
upper-class modernized population – a larger pro-
portion of the population in oil-rich and West-
ernizing Iran – constructions of motherhood began
to change. With more female education, a later age514 motherhood
of marriage, birth control, and middle- and upper-
class women working in professional positions out-
side the home, the singular emphasis on marriage
and motherhood for women began to weaken. In
the period after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, rul-
ing clerics again pressed for women’s primary roles
as wives and mothers in the home and encouraged
high birth rates. However, in the 1990s and into the
twenty-first century, the age of marriage and first
birth began to rise and the birth rate began to
decline drastically. Iranian girls sought education.
More females attended universities than males.
Even in rural areas, women began to postpone mar-
riage and space and limit their pregnancies. With
far fewer children, mothers and fathers began
focusing on the emotional, social, educational, and
psychological needs of each child. Constructions of
mothers and motherhood began to evolve from that
of the totally self-sacrificing devoted mother to one
of companion and guide. Such changes took place
far less often in the other countries of the area. In
Afghanistan, in the poverty and disruption of 25
years of war, chaos, and political repression, most
females could not attend school or work. Even in
the post-Taliban era, conservative gender rules con-
tinue to restrict lives of women. This is true among
the Afghans and Pakistani Pukhtuns particularly,
and also among Muslims in Pakistan and India,
although women here are not quite as severely
restricted to home-bound roles of wife and mother.
However, women who attend university and work
outside the home still give priority to their respon-
sibilities of home, husband, and children.
Elderly mothers in Afghanistan continue to live
with their children. Nuclearization of the family
and grandmothers living separately from their chil-
dren is not frequent among Muslims in Pakistan
and India. However, in Iran, for those widows who
are in good enough health to care for themselves,
changes are taking place. Although Iranians until
recently believed that elderly parents should live
with their children and take a central place in their
lives, now many, perhaps even most, older widows
who are able to care for themselves live in their own
homes. The view of mother is changing from that of
devoted mother and grandmother to that of rather
independent mother and grandmother who decides
on her geographical mobility, trips, pilgrimages,
and visits. Sometimes these women feel cheated.
They had been at the beck and call of a demanding
mother-in-law, but now when they have reached the
life stage at which they expect to reap the harvest of
their acquiescence to a patriarchal system by gain-
ing authority over daughters-in-law and a central
position in the extended family, the world has been