ABSTRACT
The focus on practices of female seclusion and veiling in Islamic societies has sometimes obscured the importance of extra-domestic networks sustained by women within their ‘separate world’. Yet such extra-domestic, women-centred networks have important bearings on gender relations, conjugal roles, and the external support women can draw upon. Purdah, as Papanek points out in a seminal paper (Papanek 1973a), is both a system of task allocations and an expression of male and family status. In the latter sense, purdah is non-complementary. It rests on the conception of an active male, an achiever in the public domain, and a passive female, secluded within the domestic domain, the object of male protection. This is purdah in its most extreme manifestation (Jeffery 1979). Women participate vicariously in their husbands’ achieved status (Papanek 1973a, 1973b) and are constitutive of this status as passive-objects in need of protection.
