many villagers spoke of a family’s right to kill a
daughter who conceives outside marriage, today
family honor is more often preserved through an
abortion. Men and women explained that today
women love their daughters too much to bring
themselves to kill them. Many villagers still argued
that a family with honor would kill their daughter
unless she already had children that needed her. “In
the past the lover would be hung from the tree and
his limbs would be broken,” a villager remembered
(Moore 1998a, 152–3). In recent years the state has
outlawed these local remedies. Still, crimes of
honor are not totally obliterated. Communities
swear their members to secrecy and perjure them-
selves in court to protect their right to administer
their own justice (ibid., 150).
Among Paxtun women in Pakistan’s Northwest
Frontier Province paxto, gherat, and sharmdefine
honor. Grima notes that men and women demon-
strate honor in distinct ways. Adult women
exchange gifts, songs, visits, and personal narra-
tives at times of great sadness or joy. Women show
shame, modesty, and subservience by remaining
silent in the presence of designated others, obedi-
ence, and eating after the men (1992, 37). Veiling of
adult women in public is expected as part of the
honor complex, but throwing off the veil or “for-
getting” to wear it in public is used by women as an
expression of severe pain and trauma (ibid., 39–
40). This is important because enduring great suf-
fering and the sharing of hardships is at the core of
women’s identity and honor. Grima concludes that
women hold the key to men’s honor: “She can help
or hinder honor, but she cannot control it” (ibid.,
164). A woman’s honor should be under the con-
trol of a man; if alone or with a weak man, the com-
munity sees her as without honor. “Paxtomakes no
allowances for a woman alone” (ibid.).
Rahman writes about women and microcredit in
rural Bangladesh. He notes that hierarchical con-
trol in patrilineal, patrilocal villages, notions of
honor and shame, and a village council that is
responsible for maintaining moral conduct are all
manipulated to help ensure there are high repayment
rates at the bank. According to Rahman, the micro-
credit industry uses women’s “positional vulnerabil-
ity” to ensure repayment of loans. Loans are most
often used by men but given to women who are seen
as “more disciplined (passive/submissive)” than
men. These loans must be repaid in weekly install-
ments or the group of peer borrowers will not be
granted future loans. The recalcitrant borrower
will be humiliated in public, bringing durnam(bad
reputation) to the household, lineage, and village.
For a man the same humiliation would mean almost
south asia 217nothing (Rahman 1999, 75). Thus women and
household members try to arrange women’s loan
installments on time to safeguard the family honor.
Traditionally, a woman’s working outside the
home for pay was considered dishonorable. Women
were expected to remain modestly within the
domestic sphere or work in the family fields. Men
were expected to protect and provide for women.
Today, the relationship between women, purdah,
and social status is changing in both rural and
urban areas. In Bangladesh, poverty combined with
microcredit loans leads families to allow Muslim
women to travel abroad or migrate to urban areas
for work (Rahman 1999, White 1992, Zaman
1996). Kabeer spoke with female garment workers
in Dhaka, Bangladesh where she found that women
were pragmatic about their financial needs, the
breakdown of traditional family ties, and commu-
nity safety nets. Women argued for individual
responsibility, a “purdah of the mind,” instead
of lineage control (2000, 91). Family honor was
reinterpreted in terms of factory honor where co-
workers were seen as fictive kin and workers were
instructed on moral factory behavior (not talking
to others, not retaliating insults, and concentrating
on work). Kabeer found that levels of tolerance to
change were different for women and men. Women
welcomed the added income for their families while
men felt that women’s work challenged men’s mas-
culinity and their material privileges.
Shaheed found that challenges to control-based
notions of honor in Pakistan come most from
women who are educated, unmarried, or heads of
households. Honor codes were most strictly en-
forced with young reproductive wives. A persistent
complaint was that strictly controlled mobility
affected women’s leisure, socializing, studies, work,
and coping with crises (1998, 151).
Rahman noted that notions of honor are focused
on the status of women in society irrespective of
religious beliefs, Hindu or Muslim (1999, 74).
Jeffery and Jeffery agree. They comment, “Casting
slurs on another man’s womenfolk or subjecting
them to sexual harassment are means through which
men compete for dominance. All women, then, reg-
ularly experience controls over their mobility and
demeanor that structure their experience of the
world beyond their homes” (1998, 123–4).Bibliography
B. Grima, The performance of emotion among Paxton
women, Austin, Tex. 1992.
P. Jeffery and R. Jeffery, Gender, community and the local
state in Bijnor, India, in P. Jeffery and A. Basu (eds.),
Appropriating gender. Women’s activism and politicized
religion in South Asia, New York 1998, 123–41.