"The Sacrificial Daughter; Working class Pakistani women's strategies for balancing work and domestic work.


Fauzia Husain, Queen's University

Frontline jobs require onerous time commitments from workers. In the Pakistani context, women cops, health workers, and airline attendants do not work regular 9 to 5 hours. They work nights and weekends and are often compelled to work overtime. Their demanding jobs make it impossible for them to fulfill their domestic work, which is still largely seen as a woman’s responsibility in this context. Meanwhile, neoliberalism keeps amping up the pressures on working-class women to work longer and longer hours in the face of an increasingly precarious economic situation in Pakistan. To manage the impossible double bind of balancing demanding jobs with demanding domestic duties, women come up with various strategies. In this paper, I focus on one that I call “the sacrificial daughter.” For many women working full-time frontline jobs, a young daughter or younger sister serves as a sacrifice to their mother/elder sister’s job. These young girls are kept out of school and other developmental activities and trained to cook, clean, and watch over younger siblings. Their sacrifice enables their mother/sister to continue to work. Some frontline women serve as sacrificial daughters themselves, forgoing marriage, or personal development in order to fund the education and development of siblings who have no other source of support. Finally, some frontline women offer themselves up as sacrificial daughters by agreeing to be second wives to men who already have families, such an arrangement makes it possible for them to maintain their support for their natal family while also obtaining the respectability and protection of marriage. The paper considers these different strategies women adopt to manage impossible work-life demands and examines the theoretical implications of their choices for the literature on work-family balance.

This paper will be presented at the following session: