Muslim women ot India, in an excerpt from Frogs in a Well. Indian Women in Purdah (Zed Press, 57 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DN ENGLAND), describe the child-bearing pressures in their lives.

Like women in many parts of Asia and Africa, the pirzada women of India have been caught in a hiatus between improvements in life expectancy and the non-availability to them of effective contraceptive techniques. One woman with nine living children can serve as an example. She was married when she was about eighteen and her first child was born about a year after her marriage. As with all her children, she breastfed her son. Unlike several of her contemporaries, who made comments like "one child was hardly out of my stomach before the next was in", she found that lactation protected her from pregnancy, but she became pregnant again almost immediately after weaning her children. There is a gap of about two and a half years between each child and the next. Her second child died in infancy and her nine children now range from 40 to 17 years of age, the youngest being born just before her oldest daughter was married. She told me that her mother-in-law had only three children who survived to adulthood, and she was anxious that her only son's wife should bear many children. Looking back she felt that a larger gap between children would have been better, so that each child could have been taught to feed and dress before the next one arrived. She approved of the five year gap between the two children of one of her sons. Equally she felt that to have three or four children was an important insurance for old age, but that more children create too many worries.

According to the accounts of the women themselves, the only way of limitingfamily size which was known to them until the last ten years was reducing the frequency of sexual intercourse. This was common after grandchildren have been born, but is also sometimes employed by women whose children are still unmarried. But in general, according to the older women, people in the past had "no wisdom" and just believed in the will of God. When I asked if people had not wanted many children in those days, one woman responded:

No. They didn't at all. It's not true to say that people in the old days wanted many children and that the fashion has changed now. No. The thing is that there was no "family plan" available then. People thought that a person's coming and going was according to God's will and nothing could be done. But we know better now. Even though God ultimately governs everything, that does not mean in Islam that a person should abandon all care : he should take proper food and pay attention to his health, and the same applies to the number of children a woman has. I suppose there may be some other changes — that's true. The radio programme Behnen is always telling people to send their daughters to school and people are gradually changing their ways of thinking. And educating children is costly — and there are other things to spend money on as well these days which didn't exist before, like TV — so people are now thinking that many children make many expenses, and are thinking of family planning. But now there is the knowledge to do that — which there wasn't before.

Another woman, married about 12 years and with just two daughters, said that she was happy to have a small family, though her husband would like to have a son some day. Her mother, by contrast, regretted having so many children. The daughter reckoned up that her father had sired about 17 children, though not all of these are still alive. She said that her mother was continually lamenting the worries which her enormous brood have brought, and said she would have limited the numbers if only she had known how.

At present, the women consider that men generally want more children than their wives do and thatfamily limitation is as much a question of gaining the husband's consent as it is of availability of contraceptive techniques. Complaints about husbands were mainly directed to this question. Several women were currently having to deal with husbands who wanted them to have more children, preferably sons. One woman, who had been advised to have a hysterectomy, said that her husband would not permit
the operation:

He wants another son. If two of our three children had been boys he would have been satisfied, but we have only one son. Many men say that it is the woman's fault if there are no sons — but it isn't. It's God's will. The trouble is, how can we tell if another child will be a boy or a girl ? That's what 1 tell my husband when we discuss the matter. I don't want any more children — whatever else, I know that it won't be my husband who will have to look after it and do all the extra housework. What trouble does a man have from children ? He doesn't have to go through nine months of trouble, then the danger of childbirth and all the problems of bringing children up which fall on the woman.

Another woman, also with three children, is under the same pressure to have another child:

But three have been quite enough for me and my health. If he wants more children, he'll have to take another wife — that's all. The trouble is that a boy and girl don't meet before they marry, and their parents certainly don't talk about how many children they should have. It's no wonder that husbands and wives don't agree about how many children they want.

Another woman put it even more starkly: "Some men care more about having many children than they do about their wife's health."

It is not just that pregnancies debilitate a woman. Large numbers of children make it impossible for her to do her work properly. Large families create more cleaning and cooking, more mending and washing than small ones. These days women can expect that most, if not all, of their children will survive until adulthood. But this was not always the case. In the days when epidemics could wipe out small children within days, there was no such security. The only hope of perpetuating a line was through a woman who bore many children : only then could a man be sure that some would survive. Children could be seen as a valuable good which women should produce in quantity. Under different circumstances, children acquire a different meaning. Improved life chances mean that more of the children born survive to create more housework for their mothers, more cares about their marriages and, nowadays, more anxiety over their education and employment. A child can be costly; many children can be worryingly so. And in any case, how can a woman give adequate attention to a large brood of children? How can she ensure that they are well mannered and that they
grow up to be pious and worthy Muslims? Creating "human beings" is no insignificant job; but men have little to do with it, and the harassed housewife cannot perform her duties properly. And who but the women have all the extra work which the children's marriages will bring ? For the husband, many children mean many heirs; the women have to face all the less pleasant consequences.

There are, then, pervasive undercurrents of discontent among the pirzada women about matters which impinge on them daily. Young women more than old resent the "imprisonment" of life in purdah. Old women rather than young complain of the trials of having many children — and pray that their daughters will not have to experience what they have. The unmarried dread their inevitable marriages and young and old, married and unmarried bemoan their ignorance. These are matters in which individual
women have had little control over their own lives. Marriage is not something which they can escape. They cannot decide not to be withdrawn from school, and only recently have women been able to limit the number of children which they bear. It is their fate, their qismat, but it is not a destiny which they all accept without regret, or without question.