“Women Move the Cradle with One Hand and with the Other, the World!”

This chapter presents a methodological approach to outline how women present their lives through different sources, including folk theater plays, interviews, ethnographic field experiences, letters, and diaries. A Tajik saying holds that "Women move the cradle with one hand and with the other, the world!" The meaning of this saying is that women may simply move a cradle with their baby and care for the family, while they can also have a significant impact on society. The chapter identifies three main parties in this conceptual dispute pertaining to gender: the government, international organizations, and neo-religious activists. These sources are ways of engaging with existence itself and ways of sharing the experience of life. Unlike other countries in Central Asia, Tajikistan experienced a civil war in the 1990s that destroyed many of the small industries and enterprises in rural areas, changed land ownership, and destroyed the infrastructure left over from the Soviet period.