Challenging dominant ideology of patriarchy

Business Recorder

2 days ago

EDITORIAL: That the scourge of toxic patriarchy has long made life a relentless battle for women in Pakistan — curbing their freedoms, crushing their agency and denying them basic rights in homes, workplaces, courts, and corridors of power — is a brutal reality that demands urgent reckoning.
It is highly welcome then that the Supreme Court's July 23 verdict directly confronts one facet of this deeply entrenched patriarchal mindset, unequivocally condemning the cruel and discriminatory weaponisation of a woman's infertility as a means to strip her of rights guaranteed under Pakistani law.
Chief Justice Yahya Afridi, while dismissing a petition in which a husband had challenged his wife's right to maintenance and dower, castigated him for the sheer cruelty he inflicted upon her, not just in marriage but through prolonged litigation.
The petitioner had abandoned his wife within a year of their union and failed to provide any support or maintenance thereafter.
Years later, when she turned to the courts seeking recovery of her dowry, maintenance and dower, he responded with some vindictive claims, alleging she was medically unfit for conjugal duties, incapable of bearing children, and effectively challenged her identity as a woman under the law to deny her rightful legal entitlements. This deeply offensive and baseless claim, disproven by medical evidence, formed the crux of his legal strategy. In doing so, he subjected his estranged wife to years of public humiliation, emotional trauma and highly invasive medical examinations through three tiers of court, causing the judicial process itself to become a tool of degradation.
In his seven-page order, where the petitioner was also fined Rs500,000 for his malicious assertions, the chief justice made it unequivocally clear that infertility, in any case, cannot be used as a pretext to deny a woman her right to dower or maintenance, nor can it be grounds to question her womanhood. In a country where women are routinely deprived of maintenance on flimsy, fabricated or no grounds at all, the moral clarity and unambiguous reasoning of this ruling decisively shuts the door on all such regressive justifications.
The Supreme Court's ruling is a commendable intervention, but more must be done to protect women against such malevolent legal harassment and systemic erosion of their rights. As the chief justice noted, '… women in our society constitute a vulnerable group, whose dignity requires vigilant protection and care'.
In an ideal system, the respondent should never have had to defend her womanhood in open court, an ordeal that could have been avoided with greater sensitivity and restraint from the lower judiciary. While the Supreme Court has, in recent years, largely stood firmly on the side of justice for women facing systemic and social abuse, it is the lower courts where the adoption of more gender-sensitive approaches is essential to ensure that the legal process does not become a harrowing experience for female litigants.
Therefore, more gender-sensitive training, procedural safeguards and legal protections must be introduced to ensure that women are not re-victimised by the very system they turn to for justice.
Here, it is also important to question societal norms that have turned infertility and personal choices around child-bearing into sources of stigma, reducing a woman's worth to her reproductive capacity. This mindset not only fuels discrimination within families and communities but also enables structural injustices to be inflicted upon women without shame or consequence. Breaking this stigma is vital to ensuring women are treated with dignity, both in society and before the law.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025