families they elaborately care for and supervise
children, especially in Iran. In well-appointed
households with few children or where servants or
several women share the work, women are under-
employed and spend their time with embroidery
(clothes, pillows, draperies), knitting, socializing
(in Iran), and preparing hope chests for unmarried
girls in the house (especially in Afghanistan.) In
Iran women everywhere now aim for diversion and
income-creating skills by taking courses where
offered (literacy, cooking, languages, computers,
make-up, sewing, even exercise.)
Among working women the double shift of job
and housework is the norm, with few exceptions.
For men home is the place to relax. Wherever
women work at home on income-creating projects
(spinning, weaving, embroidery, sewing, bead-
work, stitching of cotton-yarn shoes), men market
these goods, and the male household head usually
controls this income like any other. There are
exceptions, though: a traditional, pious father (hus-
band) may refuse to touch his daughters’ (wife’s)
money and will not allow it to be spent on anything
he ought to provide (such as clothes); and working
middle-class women increasingly demand and re-
tain control over their income, especially in Iran.
In rural areas and nomadic camps women have
many more chores of vital importance to the fam-
ily’s economy; again, their labor is less gender-
restricted than is men’s. Men are responsible for
animals, fields, the upkeep of the family, and repre-
sentation, but women provide help ranging from
entertaining guests to collecting wild vegetables
and berries, getting grass for cows, herding young
animals, fetching and holding sheep and goats (by
young girls) at milking, to hoeing, weeding, plant-
ing rice seedlings, harvesting legumes, sapping
poppies, binding sheaves, picking fruit, and carry-
ing things. Men herd, water, shear, market, and
butcher animals. Women care for and control poul-
try. In pre-Islamic Nuristan (Afghanistan) goats
were linked to the realm of fairies, too pure to be
touched by women. Everywhere else women milk
animals and process milk and wool. In Afghanistan
felt rugs are made by women, in Iran mostly by
male itinerant felt makers. The heaviest tasks for
rural/ nomadic women are hauling water (tradi-
tionally in goatskin bags carried on the hip), han-
dling heavy household goods including heavy tent
planes and beams while pitching and razing tents,
and carrying children and wooden cradles on the
back. (In Iran, households increasingly are trans-
ported by trucks.) Collecting and lugging firewood
and the transport of grain sheaves to threshing
areas in some parts of rural Iran and Afghanistan
south asia 239are women’s back-breaking tasks, as they were in
the past. Women complain about these chores. In
the absence of radical changes in rural women’s
work and in the gender division of labor generally,
the relative leisure of urban lifestyles is becoming
increasingly attractive to women. At present, women
in rapidly modernizing, relatively wealthy Iran have
better chances of attaining urban labor patterns
than women in deprived Afghanistan.Bibliography
L. Beck, Women among Qashqa±i nomadic pastoralists in
Iran, in L. Beck and N. Keddie (eds.), Women in the
Muslim world, Cambridge, Mass. 1978, 351–73.
D. Bradburd, Ambiguous relations. Kin, class, and con-
flict among Komachi pastoralists, Washington, D.C.
1990.
V. Doubleday, Three women of Herat, Austin 1988.
S. Farman-Farmaian, Daughter of Persia, New York
1992.
E. Friedl, Women and the division of labor in an Iranian
village, in Middle East Report 95 (1981), 12–18.
——,Women of Deh Koh. Lives in an Iranian village,
Washington, D.C. 1989.
B. Glatzer, Nomaden von Gharjistan, Wiesbaden 1977.
B. Grima, The performance of emotion among Paxtun
women, Austin, Tex. 1992.
H. Hansen, The Kurdish woman’s life, Copenhagen
1961.
M. E. Hegland, Political roles of Aliabad women. The
public-private dichotomy transcended, in N. Keddie
and B. Baron (eds.), Women in Middle Eastern history,
New Haven, Conn. 1991, 215–30.
W. Maggi, Our women are free. Gender and ethnicity in
the Hindukush, Ann Arbor 2001.
G. S. Robertson, The kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, London
1896.
N. Tapper, Bartered brides. Politics, gender and marriage
in an Afghan tribal society, Cambridge 1991.
B. Tavakolian, Sheikhanzai women. Sisters, mothers and
wives, in Ethnos52 (1987), 180–99.Erika Loeffler FriedlSouth AsiaSouth Asia represents considerable cultural, reli-
gious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity that is re-
flected in domestic and cultural life. The lives of
Muslim women are as diverse across South Asia as
the lives of Hindu and Christian women. These dif-
ferences influence women’s participation in paid
work but their implications for gendering of work
within the home is less evident. Regional diversity
can be characterized by a general northwest/south
split and in some indicators the east has distinctive
features as well (Dyson and Moore 1983). Women
in the south fare better in education and survival
than women in the north, although even in the
south women have relatively low autonomy and
mobility compared to the rest of the world.