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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
The Soviet era saw the implementation of policies designed to transform
the status of women. During the 1930s, the Soviet authorities launched a
campaign for women's equality in Tajikistan, as they did elsewhere in
Central Asia. Eventually major changes resulted from such programs, but
initially they provoked intense public opposition. For example, women who
appeared in public without the traditional all-enveloping veil were
ostracized by society or even killed by relatives for supposedly shaming
their families by what was considered unchaste behavior.
World War II brought an upsurge in women's employment outside the home.
With the majority of men removed from their civilian jobs by the demands
of war, women compensated for the labor shortage. Although the employment
of indigenous women in industry continued to grow even after the war, they
remained a small fraction of the industrial labor force after
independence. In the early 1980s, women made up 51 percent of Tajikistan's
population and 52 percent of the work force on collective farms, but only
38 percent of the industrial labor force, 16 percent of transportation
workers, 14 percent of communications workers, and 28 percent of civil
servants. (These statistics include women of Russian and other non-Central
Asian nationalities.) In some rural parts of the republic, about half the
women were not employed at all outside the home in the mid-1980s. In the
late Soviet era, female underemployment was an important political issue
in Tajikistan because it was linked to the Soviet propaganda campaign
portraying Islam as a regressive influence on society.
The issue of female employment was more complicated than was indicated
by Soviet propaganda, however. Many women remained in the home not only
because of traditional attitudes about women's roles but also because many
lacked vocational training and few child care facilities were available.
By the end of the 1980s, Tajikistan's preschools could accommodate only
16.5 percent of the children of appropriate age overall and only 2.4
percent of the rural children. Despite all this, women provided the core
of the work force in certain areas of agriculture, especially the
production of cotton and some fruits and vegetables. Women were
underrepresented in government and management positions relative to their
proportion of the republic's population. The Communist Party of
Tajikistan, the government (especially the higher offices), and economic
management organizations were largely directed by men.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, Tajik social norms and
even de facto government policy still often favored a traditionalist,
restrictive attitude toward women that tolerated wife beating and the
arbitrary dismissal of women from responsible positions. In the late
Soviet period, Tajik girls still commonly married while under age despite
official condemnation of this practice as a remnant of the "feudal"
Central Asian mentality.
Tajik society never has been organized by tribal affiliation. The core
of the traditional social structure of Tajiks and other sedentary peoples
of Central Asia is usually the extended family, which is composed of an
adult couple, their unmarried daughters, and their married sons and their
wives and children. Such a group normally has joint ownership of the
family homestead, land, crops, and livestock. The more prosperous a
family, the more members it is likely to have. In the 1930s, some
particularly wealthy Tajik families had fifty members or more. Although
Islam permits polygamy, that practice has been illegal in Tajikistan for
about seventy years; monogamy is the more typical form of spousal
relationship because of the high bride-price traditionally required of
suitors.
Traditional family ties remain strong. Tajikistan had one of the
highest percentages of people living in families rather than singly in the
Soviet Union. According to the 1989 census, 69 percent of the men aged
sixteen or older and 67 percent of the women in that age group were
married, 2 percent of the men and 10 percent of the women were widowers or
widows, and 1.7 percent of the men and 4 percent of the women were
divorced or separated. Only 7.5 percent of men over age forty and 0.4
percent of women over forty never had been married.
The strength of the family is sometimes misinterpreted as simply a
consequence of Islam's influence on Tajik society. However, rural
societies in general often emphasize the family as a social unit, and
Islam does not forbid divorce. Grounds for divorce in Tajikistan include
childlessness, emotional estrangement (in some cases the result of
arranged marriages), a shortage of housing, drunkenness, and economic
dissatisfaction. The highest rate of divorce is in Dushanbe, which has not
only an acute housing shortage but a large number of inhabitants belonging
to non-Central Asian nationalities. Marriage across nationality lines is
relatively uncommon. Ethnically mixed marriages are almost twice as likely
to occur in urban as in rural areas.
Data as of March 1996
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