There is a ghost haunting Pakistan's discourse on women's rights — and it is not the ghost of oppression alone, but the ghost of misunderstanding. Across drawing rooms and social media timelines, in offices granting NOCs to conduct feminist women's gatherings, in madrasas and university corridors alike, the word feminism has become either a battle cry or a curse word, depending on which side of the room you sit on. But in both cases, it is being terribly, perhaps wilfully, misread.
Ask a man in the bazaar of Peshawar what feminism means, and he will likely tell you it means women who refuse to cook, who dress like men, who smoke in public, and who seek to dominate. Ask an activist who has recently participated in Karachi’s Aurat March what it means, and she may describe a liberation that measures itself entirely by how far it can depart from anything traditionally feminine. Both answers are wrong. And both, in their wrongness, conspire to keep the real conversation about dignity, justice, and structural equality permanently off the table.
The Double Misunderstanding
The confusion about feminism is not a single mistake — it is a double one. The first error belongs to the conservatives: a genuine, if irrational, terror that granting women equal rights means dismantling the family, unseating male authority, and unravelling the social fabric. Under this reading, every woman who demands access to education, to inheritance, to safety on the street, is understood as a rebel who wishes to become a man rather than simply be respected as a woman.
The second error, more quietly destructive, belongs to a section of those who call themselves feminists. In their anxiety to prove that women are not inferior, they have sometimes argued that women must demonstrate this by adopting masculine aesthetics, masculine aggression, and masculine indifference to domesticity. Dressing boldly becomes the proof of liberation. Rejecting softness becomes the mark of strength. Looking like a man becomes the measure of being equal to one. This is not feminism. This is an internalised patriarchy wearing feminist clothing.
Beyond the Wardrobe War
In Pakistan, the question of what a woman wears has become the entire proxy war for a much larger ideological battle. Cover fully, and you are traditional, modest, respectable. Wear Western clothes, cut your hair short, or adopt any manner deemed "masculine", and you are a feminist — a label offered sometimes approvingly, sometimes with contempt, but almost always reductively. This is a catastrophic narrowing of what feminism is.
A woman in a hijab who demands equal inheritance rights is a feminist. A woman in jeans who cannot vote freely in her own household is not, by that act alone, liberated. The burqa does not oppress; the absence of choice does. The miniskirt does not liberate; the right to choose does.
Feminism and Domesticity
One of the most persistent myths driving resistance to feminism in Pakistan is the idea that feminism seeks to abolish the role of women as mothers, wives, and caregivers — that it is at war with womanhood itself. This fear is not entirely without cause. A strain of Western second-wave feminism did, at points, treat the domestic sphere as inherently degrading and motherhood as a trap. Some of these ideas entered Pakistani public consciousness through imported discourse without sufficient localisation, and the reaction was predictable and fierce.
But a mature, grounded feminism — one rooted in the realities of Pakistani women's lives, in the soil of Malakand or Multan, Karachi or Chitral — does not ask a woman to surrender her identity as a mother, daughter, or wife. It asks her not to be reduced to these roles. There is an enormous difference between being a loving mother by choice and being a prisoner of the kitchen by force. Feminism defends the former and challenges the latter. It does not abolish domesticity; it refuses to make it the only permissible destiny. What it insists upon is that no woman should be forced into any one of these roles simply by virtue of having been born female.
The Core Demand: Justice
The masses should understand that feminism is not a set of aesthetic choices involving bold lips, short hair, trousers, or cigarettes. It is not a posture of rebellion adopted to signal identity or disrupt convention for its own sake. "Mera Jism Meri Marzi" does not translate, in this context, into dressing boldly; rather, it translates into owning one's choices, whether that means choosing to wear a hijab willingly or having the right to say no to men forcing physical intimacy.
It is, at its irreducible core, a demand for justice: that women be treated as full human beings before the law, in the workplace, within the home, and in the public square. In Pakistan, that demand is still radically unfulfilled. Women own less than three per cent of land. Honour-based violence claims hundreds of lives each year. Forced marriages destroy the youth of girls whose consent was never considered a necessary element of the contract. Women in FATA and rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are still excluded from the inheritance their faith explicitly guarantees them. Female literacy in parts of Balochistan remains below thirty per cent. Against this backdrop of structural violence, the debate over whether a feminist should dress a certain way is not merely a distraction; it is an insult to the gravity of what real women are enduring.
Structural Solutions Over Symbolic Battles
If we are serious about feminism in Pakistan, the conversation must move from bodies and wardrobes to laws and structures. We must demand the full implementation of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance. We must demand that inheritance rights guaranteed by the Quran are enforced in the courts of Pakistan. We must demand that the crime of honour killing be prosecuted with the seriousness of murder, not treated as a family matter. We must demand accessible judicial remedies for women who are beaten in their own homes.
None of these demands requires a woman to dress differently, speak more aggressively, or abandon the feminine dimensions of her identity. All of them require the state, the law, and society to recognise that she is a full human being—equal in dignity before God and before the Constitution.
Reclaiming Feminism
The caricature of feminism as muscular rebellion — as women seizing male power, imitating male aesthetics, and rejecting womanhood — serves a useful purpose for those who wish to avoid the harder conversation. As long as feminism can be dismissed as a Western import championed by women in strange clothing who hate their own culture, the structural injustices that kill, impoverish, and silence millions of Pakistani women every year can remain comfortably undiscussed.
We must insist on reclaiming feminism as what it actually is: not a costume, not a posture, not a competition with men, but a principled commitment to the proposition that women are human beings — and that human beings deserve justice. A woman can wear a dupatta and be a feminist. She can love her children fiercely and be a feminist. She can honour her faith, embrace her culture, and find beauty in her femininity — and still be a feminist. What she cannot do, and remain in the truthful spirit of feminism, is accept that these things make her less than a man, or less than a citizen, or less than a person whose life matters. That is the feminism Pakistan needs. Not masculinity. Not imitation. Justice.
Munazza Hameed is a social activist and founder of BloomHer Pakistan, a women empowerment organization based in Malakand.
