Abbey Swan

Today’s Central Asian women learned in school that they could be astronauts, doctors, or defense attorneys when they grew up. At home, however, traditional gender roles have survived, and instead of going to the moon, this generation’s potential professional female workforce is leaving school at fourteen to get married. Soviet cultural policies concerning women’s equal education seemed effective for years, but almost immediately upon independence, evidence surfaced that traditional gender roles still dominated the Central Asian states.

The five former Soviet states that constitute Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—share many historical influences that have contributed to their present conditions. Today, all five have distinct social, political, and economic atmospheres, but each bears clear evidence of their collective Soviet past. Women’s rights and education is no exception. Within a very short period of time, women’s rights in Central Asia have exhibited remarkable advancements—and in many places, devastating setbacks. Taken collectively, the five republics provide a valuable case study on the effects of social, political, and economic upheaval on women’s education.

During the Soviet Era

Prior to their gradual colonization by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, the lands of Central Asia were controlled by nomadic tribes and a few sedentary local city states, and the population practiced varying forms of Sunni Islam. In the north, nomadic Islamic practices were for the most part superficial, while in the south, hundreds of madrassah (religious colleges) sprung up in ancient urban centers. Islamic education was widespread, especially in the south, but rote memorization tactics led to shallow literacy in Arabic and hardly any literacy in local languages. Education for women and girls was practically nonexistent beyond the primary level (Johnson 2004).

During Russian colonization and continuing after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, political leaders saw educational reform as important to shaping Central Asian nationalism while producing a more economically productive and Russified population. The Soviets established “national” borders and constructed ethnic and national identities through education in an effort to prevent pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic identities from taking root. The new Soviet power structure closed Islamic schools and moved Central Asia in a more secular direction, making education compulsory through the secondary level for both men and women and expanding gender equity in education and politics (Akiner 1997).

The Soviets saw women’s education as a strategy for emancipating indigenous women in order to create a “surrogate proletariat” and increase the number of educated workers in the region. New laws raised the minimum marriage from nine to sixteen, gave women legal autonomy, and allowed divorce. For the first time, Central Asian women gained full participation in public life. While indoctrination and waves of political violence in the 1930s successfully eliminated any public opposition to new Soviet values, older behavioral patterns continued to dominate gender roles in the private sphere (Akiner 1997).

The result was a mix of progress and stagnation. With traditional values temporarily suppressed to make room for a new era of potential enlightenment, women’s literacy rates, which had been only 1 percent in the 1920s, increased dramatically. By the end of the 1930s, women were entering tertiary education and the professional workforce for the first time. Hiring preferences in favor of women led to promotions in business and politics, and women’s achievements won effusive public acclaim. Perhaps these drastic changes in their public lives prompted Central Asian women to hold more firmly to traditional values at home. Girls continued to leave school earlier than boys in order to be married. Although increased literacy often leads to lower birth rates, Central Asian women continued to experience some of the highest birth rates in the world, a trend which continues today. Even female doctors and lawyers adhered strictly to conservative familial structures and customs as Central Asian society became a complex amalgam of tradition and Westernized modernity (Akiner 1997).

In the end, the Soviet strategy to use women as tools of the socialist revolution failed to fully redefine gender roles and bring about total equality. A peculiar mix of orthodoxy and modernism continued to exist throughout the period of Soviet rule, and in most areas, women never reached full educational parity with men (Akiner 1997).

After Independence

Just as women’s liberation was forced upon Central Asians by the Soviets, national independence also came from outside. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant yet another upheaval in the lives of Central Asians. The debate about modernity and tradition has once more intensified in the five countries of Central Asia. With politicians touting the return of religious freedom, conservative values have escaped from under the Soviet rug. Social and economic vacuums arising after the Soviet Union’s demise have made room for radical religious sects to spring up, especially in the Ferghana region of Uzbekistan. With them has come a return to stricter conservative standards affecting all areas of public life, including education (Salimova 2008). Since the end of Soviet prohibitions, arranged marriages have increased dramatically, and girls are leaving school during or immediately after secondary education to marry. In Uzbekistan, for example, more than 40 percent of marriages in 1998 are thought to have been arranged, meaning that women are increasingly denied choices concerning both their education and their social futures (Jones 1999).

With the loss of the Soviet infrastructure, the remote regions of Central Asia are suffering disproportionately in terms of education and health services. As a result, the gap in educational attainment between urban and rural women has grown quickly (Starr 2007). With reduced access to government resources, failing economies, and more traditional values now dominant among the population base, women in remote rural areas can have very little hope of improving their educational prospects. Even in urban centers in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, girls who haven’t left school early are married immediately following graduation from secondary school—usually around age seventeen. This lower marriage age contrasts with the typical age of marriage before independence (around twenty-one or twenty-two, or after graduation from university) (Najibullah 2007). As college-educated women struggle to find jobs in declining economies, younger women seek the economic security of marriage and usually become skilled laborers. Also, while most tertiary education remains free, few families can afford the cost of books and lodging in the cities where universities are located. As a result, women represent only one quarter of students in higher education in Tajikistan and only 30 percent in Uzbekistan (Blua 2003).

Not all areas within Central Asia have seen a downturn in women’s education, however. In the urban centers of Kazakhstan, for example, tertiary education rates for women are equal to those of men, and many women aren’t marrying until their thirties (Najibullah 2007). In Kyrgyzstan, women actually outnumber men in institutes of higher education (Blua 2003). Unsurprisingly, the northern countries of Central Asia—which have a greater percentage of Russian and Ukrainian citizens who share a more secular history—seem to have accepted a more westernized view of gender roles. And even Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have begun to acknowledge the importance of educating women. Uzbekistan has begun subsidizing common school expenses for primary school students, while Tajikistan has launched a campaign aimed at informing the parents of girls about the importance of education. The Tajik government has also supported a quota system at the nation’s universities, reserving a number of spots for women from rural mountain areas and providing them with financial support (Bransten 2003). Such efforts demonstrate that although they have a long way to go, the Central Asian states are not unaware of the value of educating its women citizens.

The future of women’s education and advancement in Central Asia is uncertain. Western NGOs have had little success thus far in promoting what many see as yet another colonial ideology. Most likely, while economic and political situations remain unstable, the rise in traditional gender roles and decline in educational availability will continue. If, however, gradual and sustainable development takes place, especially in the rural areas of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it seems likely that the situation for women could improve, creating a more harmonious balance between family-minded tradition and personal advancement.

References

Akiner, S. 1997. Between tradition and modernity: The dilemma facing contemporary Central Asian women. In Post-Soviet women: From the Baltic to Central Asia, ed. Mary Buckley, 261-304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blua, A. 2003. Central Asia: Girls face discrimination in schooling. Eurasianet.org, November 9. www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp110903.shtml.

Bransten, J.  2003. Central Asia: As world marks literacy day, what of USSR’s legacy? Eurasianet.org, September 8. www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav090703a.shtml.

Johnson, M. S. 2004. The legacy of Russian and Soviet education and the shaping of ethnic, religious, and national identities in Central Asia. In The challenge of education in Central Asia, ed. Stephen P. Heyneman and Alan J. De Young, 21-36. Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age Publishing.

Jones, L. 1999. As Islam replaces communism in Uzbekistan, economy stagnates, men remain “more equal” than women. Washington report on Middle East affairs, October/November. www.wrmea.com/backissues/1099/9910033.html.

Najibullah, F. 2007. Central Asia: Young women trade student life for married life. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 25. www.rferl.org/content/Article/1077320.html. 

Salimova, B. 2008. Women’s education in Central Asia: A forgotten crisis. Open Democracy News Analysis, February 22. www.opendemocracy.net/blog/opendemocracy/a_crisis_of_womens_education_in_central_asia

Starr, S. F. 2007. Women of the mountain societies of Central Asia. Paper presented at the Conference of Women in the Mountains, Orem, Utah. www.womenofthemountains.org/files/Microsoft%20Word%20-%2007-03-02-From-Starr-FINAL-PAPER-abdrisaev_mountain_conf_.pdf.