ABSTRACT
Women’s activism has always been an integral part of the Pakistani political fabric. From the establishment of the All Pakistani Women’s Association (APWA) in 1949, a pioneer women’s organization in Pakistan, to the highly vocal formation of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) in 1981, the Pakistani women’s movement engages in feminist work that cuts across all sectors of civil society: education, health, poverty, domestic violence, rape, denial of rights and legal/ political reform. The public realm of women’s issues in Pakistan is most visibly traced to the 1980s, when the Zia al-Huq regime (1979-1988) instated orthodox Islamic laws, eradicating women’s rights in rape, marriage and divorce; these laws were known as the Hudood Ordinances. The passage of the Hudood Ordinance galvanized middle-class and upper-middle-class women to form the fi rst secular and highly vocal women’s organization, the Women’s Action Forum,1 widely known as WAF (Haeri 2002). Under the Zia regime, these activists were consistently caricatured as “English-educated, westernized, upper-class women with imported ideas, having no links with grassroot realities” (Haeri 2002). While this caricature came to be deployed as a central oppositional strategy in the 1980s, the idea that feminism is a Western-derived liberation discourse and the image of the Pakistani feminist as Westernized continues to dominate the contemporary collective consciousness in Pakistan.
