Negotiation over Modernization: Elite Female Education and the Making of a Professional Class in Pakistan, 1947–1970

Abstract

In Lahore and Karachi, between 1947 and 1970, a group of upper-class, urban Muslim women emerged from the sphere of domestic obscurity to earn a living wage in professionally paid work, thereby forming a new social class. This article argues that this professional class was produced through negotiation rather than through modernization. The new state demanded educated women to work in its schools, hospitals and offices but at the same time it demanded them to be keepers of a traditional moral order, and the elites’ success stemmed from their ability to meet both demands. The article traces that negotiation through three phases: the post-Partition emergency of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when acute shortages of trained personnel opened public employment to women; the period of institutional consolidation, in which women’s colleges and professional organizations were established; and the Ayub Khan years after 1958, when state-sponsored modernization widened opportunity while intensifying conservative opposition. It is based on the work of Shenila Khoja-Moolji on the “ideal educated girl” and the work of Deniz Kandiyoti on the “patriarchal bargain” to describe two devices by which this negotiation took place: the women’s college, as a protected training ground where modern skills could be learned without contravening social convention; and the re-classification of paid employment as patriotic service, whereby a request that a conservative family was able to refuse was made capable of being accepted. It further claims that this cohort did not remain the occupational but rather one with political power that manifested itself in the All-Pakistan Women’s Association and through the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961. The study is a synthesis of published scholarship, the Report of the Commission on National Education (1959), and published memoirs; it uses no unpublished archival material and states its limitations accordingly.