Karachi Women Still Follow Moslem Rule

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31082, 10 June 1966, Page 2

Karachi Women Still Follow Moslem Rule

(N.I P.A.-Reuter) KARACHI. “Ladies holding passports without photographs can now enter Iran” read the Pakistani Government notice. It is typical of the way time sometimes seems to stand still for Moslem women in Pakistan.

There are still many thousands of “purdahshin” women, whose faces are perpetually hidden from the public by the veil. Their rules are so strict that they must carry a faceless passport Purdah women are still a common sight in Karachi, not just in the remote strongholds of Islamic conservatism. They are to be seen every day in the streets, often walking well behind their husbands in accordance with Moslem custom. One’s fellow passenger on the most modem jetliner may easily be a purdah woman wearing the age-old veil. But Pakistan is progressing —and taking its women with ft. The veil is relentlessly, if slowly, dropping, and Pakistani men are even being overtaken by the opposite sex.

One of the women’s bastions is education. This year, at Karachi University, 56 per cent of the student population is female. Women graduates received more than half the degrees conferred at the annual convocation. The. university vicechancellor (Dr. 1 H. Quereshi) commenting on the new ratio of the sexes among the

students, said: “This is very creditable considering that the education of women in Pakistan is only of recent growth. It also shows that women are not so oppressed as they used to be.” A recent labour survey in i

Pakistan bore him out Although there were fewer women than men in the professions, it said, they were treated on terms of equality. The survey found there was no difference between the advancement offered men and women or between the salaries which they were paid for the same work. Nor had marital or maternal status any effect on the conditions of their employment. However, it did find differences in the progress made by women in the two halves of the country, the East and West provinces, separated by more than 1000 miles of India. Parents in East Pakistan, it said, appeared keener to send their daughters to school than those in the West. About half the East Pakistani parents in the survey could

forecast their girls’ education: in the West, only a little more than a quarter could do so. Parents in East Pakistan were more alive to the need for higher technical and profesional education for their children, the survey reported; parents in West Pakistan were keen to educate their daughters only to school-leaving level.

Statistics show that the female labour force in Pakistan works mainly in the tea industry, textile manufacturing and in community services, like nursing, medicine and teaching. But the force is slightly

higher in East Pakistan, indicating, according to the survey, that women in West Pakistan are slower in joining the economic effort than their sisters in the other province.

The Government is eager to publicise the part women can play in Pakistan. More schools and colleges for girls are planned. Women are playing a key role staffing family planning clinics which are being established everywhere under the Government’s campaign for population control In the third five-year plan. In spite of women’s growing role, they ding firmly to Pakistani dress. Western skirts and bare female legs are seldom seen. Recently hostesses of Pakistani’s national airline, chose to keep their legs covered with the traditional “shalwar” trousers at a competition to select a new uniform.

The competition was judged by the Paris dress designer, Pierre Cardin, who gave Pakistani women this advice: “Stay in saris and shalwars. It is the only way to keep your national identity.”

Crowd at Airport—Four thousand people lined the airport at Honolulu this week when Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children, Caroline and John, arrived for a month’s vacation.