My friend P told me about her family, one day sitting in the cosy dining area just off the kitchen, which in the night time served as the parents’ bed. The children were fed and she was enjoying a brief hour’s relaxation. “During the Soviet period”, she told me, “My mother, S, was not allowed to go to school, she was stopped from attending by her own father as she was a girl.” It was not thought desirable or necessary to educate girls, as they were only going to grow up to become wives and mothers.
P describes her grandfather as being like an Afghan man. Because the family lived in the village, near Kurgan Tepe, in southern Tajikistan, it was easy enough for him to keep his daughter out of school, even during Soviet times. If they had lived in the city it would have been more difficult. Teachers did come round to try and get the grandfather to let his daughter attend school, but he was known for being a hard and angry man, and the eventually the teachers gave up.
S’s mother died when she herself was only three or four, and her father took new wife who was also horrible to her. She ended up being a cleaner at the university – which was a good job then paying a living wage, (although no longer today).
P’s mother got married, but her husband (P’s father) died at the early age of 23, after which she took another husband. Even if she had not wanted to, it would have been very difficult for her to live on her own. P underlines what a very hard life her mother had. She apologises for telling me a sad story.
However, P got a university education, getting a Tajik language diploma, a leap forward indeed from her own mother’s education. She would like to return to work teaching at the Lycee perhaps, but this depends on her husband. He has said that maybe when her youngest child is 14, in two years’ time, she will no longer need her mother so much and P may go to work.
Talking to many Tajik women they told me how women are expected to leave work when they get married, which indeed is what often took place in the United Kingdom only 50 years ago. Most women, it seems, according to one woman I spoke to, are happy to do this. My friend, N thinks in Dushanbe maybe 60% of women give up their jobs on marriage but in Kurgan Tepe over 80% do. This is because the southern city is more conservative. There is also a higher level of education in the capital.
Staying with P, I got into the rhythm of family life, discovering that naps after lunch are quite the done thing. Women who are housewives and their children returning from school, curl up on their mattresses in the corner for an hour or so. I was considered slightly strange for managing a whole day without a nap! Women at home are grabbing a well -deserved moment for themselves, a moment to indulge their daydreaming. They are often first to rise and in the evening they are busy cooking, serving and generally looking after the rest of the family. I guess this also makes extra sense in the summer, when the sultry days mean that getting up earlier when it is cooler is preferable.
P is wondering about getting a washing machine, which her husband could afford, having a well-paid job; unlike the majority of Tajik women who wash clothes by hand, for whom the cost would be prohibitive. But, she says that “The clothes washing for a family of four keeps me thin, as its high energy work, and there is so much of it”. She often wondered about the slim women on TV and grabbed her flesh, wondering how she could be like them. I told her that these women would work out at the gym many times a week. P hardly ever left the flat and eating, it seemed, was one of the few pleasures she could indulge in easily.
She told me that the bikinis being worn by the Miss World programme were bad, but that didn’t stop the family sitting down and watching the event! Tajiks are used to Russian television with its female flesh on show, so as long as it wasn’t their daughters perhaps, they didn’t mind watching a bit of ‘saucy’ family entertainment!
N said that her father did not mind her wearing a bikini in a swimming pool, and would wear it in front of him but this is unusual, I think. I remember even my own (Western, but traditional) father being slightly shocked at my string bikini! Many Tajik girls and women, if they do swim, would be fully clothed.
However, what ever they might wear in the water, one thing is definite: a girl must be a virgin when she marries. In the villages they still show the bloody sheet after the first night to show that the bride has been a good girl. Z is worried about her friend, whether she has been ‘good’ or not. The prospective sister-in-law paid Z a visit to try and find this out from her as Z is one of her best friends, and also the equivalent of the bridesmaid for the forthcoming wedding. Z told the prospective sister-in-law that it was nothing to do with either of them.
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