SHE DOES IT ALL - BUT WHO SEES IT?

South Asian women have been stretched thin in their roles as stay-at-home wives and mothers. What’s even sadder is that they don’t even realise it - nor do the people around them. For them, juggling household chores, raising children and maintaining social bonds is the default set of responsibilities they are expected to shoulder. Anything additional that they choose or are forced to do due to circumstances is considered entirely ‘their’ problem.

I cannot question a woman’s capacity to forgive and forget the injustices inflicted upon her over the years. It is evident in the courage with which they wake up every day, put a smile on their faces and serve the very people who have wronged them. Yet, even when the mind and heart seem to forget, the body remembers.

I say this with conviction as I sit before Rubab, a seamstress in her mid-40s, watching her try to steady her quivering hands as she attempts to pass the thread through the eye of a needle.

“I do get tired...,” she tells The News International, almost as an afterthought. “But I guess I’m just used to it now.”

Rubab learned sewing out of interest when she was a teenager. After marriage, as household expenses became harder to manage, it turned into a steady source of income. Still, she is adamant about referring to her sewing as something she does to “stay busy” or “help her husband out a little,” even though she spends most of her day moving between her sewing machine and the routine demands of the house.

As the owner of a small reselling business, 37-year-old Khadija’s days follow a familiar rhythm, though her work looks different from more traditional routines. She spends most of her time managing orders through WhatsApp and Instagram. On some days, she also squeezes in door-to-door visits to nearby neighbourhoods to expand her sales or deal with customer complaints in person.

“Most of my time goes into messages and orders. It doesn’t really feel like work - it just feels like I’m always on my phone,” the mother of two admits.

A shared language of minimisation runs through both their lives. Sewing is described as “staying busy,” and reselling as “just something on the side,” regardless of the hours each consumes. Neither woman fully frames what she does as ‘work’ in the way formal employment is understood.

Perhaps this is because of the way their work exists: layered between cooking, cleaning and responding to the constant demands of home and children. Moreover, according to Khadija, there is no separate acknowledgement of the income she generates from her business. “It usually just goes into household expenses,” she shares.

Though she insists she does not face any pressure from her family to do this, “I do this on my own,” expresses Khadija. Since there is no visible compulsion, the people around her consider it more of a shauq (hobby) than proper work. As a result, she adds, it is not considered a valid reason for her to “step back from household chores or responsibilities towards her children.”

The term homemaking itself barely captures the scope of what it demands. It encompasses a far wider range of responsibilities than simply managing a household. Even when it comes to raising children, a mother is expected to be a caregiver, teacher, cook and constant source of entertainment all at once. Additional expectations include caring for her husband and his extended family, while also maintaining a consistent social presence, regardless of her own workload or lack of time.

A woman’s role in a marriage has long been defined by how much load she is willing to carry beyond child-rearing duties. And if she is not bringing money into the household, is she even doing anything noteworthy? “What do you do all day?” is a question many women hear from the men in their households. There are simply not enough tasks she can list in response for it to feel like a satisfactory answer.

For Tabinda, it hardly seems to count that she brings in the larger share of the household’s monthly income by running a home salon with her two daughters. Instead, she often feels looked down upon by her extended family because of her profession.

Even within her own home, she says, the response feels more like quiet accommodation than genuine approval. “My husband doesn’t really say much about it as long as everything at home is managed.”

Clients come and go through Tabinda’s home throughout the day. Yet her attention is not focused solely on her work. Between appointments, making sure her daughters are well-fed and staying in touch with relatives through routine greetings, she is under constant pressure to manage multiple responsibilities. She suggests that maintaining these relationships is necessary not only to keep peace at home but also to ensure that her work does not suffer.

“If things at home aren’t smooth, I can’t focus on work,” Tabinda tells.

A woman’s ability to earn does not replace the expectations already placed upon her. Instead, she is expected to perform the delicate balancing act of seamlessly managing both household responsibilities and paid work. And despite “earning” the freedom to pursue her interests, a woman’s financial contribution does not transform the hierarchies within the home. The idea of the ‘breadwinner’ remains tied to formal, external work, which is often associated with men.

After all, home businesses still have ‘home’ in them. It doesn’t matter that Rubab spends her nights hunched over the sewing machine to finish orders, only to be up early the next morning preparing her husband’s meals. It doesn’t matter that the hours she puts in are rarely acknowledged as ‘real’ work. Instead, her work is treated as something she has chosen and must therefore manage without complaint. For her, being able to set aside a portion of what she calls “scattered income” for her daughter’s impending wedding feels like enough.

Meanwhile, Khadija’s work has no clear beginning or end. “Sometimes, I am attending to customers’ queries in the middle of a social gathering,” she utters casually. Her school-going children are her biggest support, helping her pack orders and sort deliveries before bedtime.

Still, the money she earns does not translate into ownership. “I don’t really keep anything aside for myself - it all goes back into the house.” In practice, she simply does not expect anything else. Echoing the sentiments of those around her, Khadija downplays the nature of her work and the effort it entails.

“Since my work is distributed throughout the day, it never feels like something that’s just mine,” she adds.

Women have long been celebrated for their resilience, for being “super,” and for doing it all. Yet what emerges from these routines is not heroism - it is invisible labour multiplied. When society refuses to recognise homemaking as real, time-consuming work, women often feel the need to go beyond it by taking on side hustles or home-based work.

For them, the motivation also stems from financial necessity. Living with financial abuse without realising it and never having ownership over their own needs and desires for much of their adulthood has pushed these women toward earning income in whatever ways are accessible, in an attempt to achieve self-sufficiency and maintain a fragile sense of autonomy. In practice, many of these women become the primary contributors to their household income without ever being acknowledged as such.

At the same time, by taking up home-based work, stay-at-home mothers and wives appear to restore their sense of self after spending years feeling unappreciated for their contributions to the household.

“Interacting with clients and listening to their stories is the only good thing about my day,” Tabinda shares. “Otherwise, I feel like I will just get lost in housework.”

Similar to Tabinda, Rubab finds small moments of satisfaction in her work, especially when it allows her to return to her passion for design. “I like it when clients trust me with their designs,” she comments. “It motivates me to do better.”

Home businesses also offer a convenient arrangement for a society that limits women’s autonomy. Women are only allowed to be independent when it aligns with the uninterrupted fulfilment of domestic responsibilities. In fact, they are only encouraged to bring in a secondary income through work that can be done within the boundaries of a home.

*Zarmeen, 34, who holds a Master’s degree in Architecture, put her career on hold after marriage. Over time, the constant demands of a joint household and raising school-going children left little room for her to return to the field. She has not been able to search for - or even apply to - an on-site role in nearly a decade.

She now runs a small crocheting business from home, fitting her work into the margins of her day. “I always thought I would go back to working in the field, but somehow the years just passed,” she acquiesces.

“It isn’t to say she no longer has a passion for it. “It just feels difficult to start again from the same place,” Zarmeen explains, referring to the ten-year-long career break.

“On the other hand, crocheting is something I know I could manage from home, alongside everything else,” she adds.

For women like Zarmeen, life is built on compromise and, in some cases, resentment towards a society that refuses to acknowledge their sacrifices. They can only mourn the time lost to an underappreciated job such as homemaking, in hopes of a better future for their children.

The impact of constantly switching roles extends beyond physical strain to affect their mental health and cause long-term burnout. These women may not even realise it, brushing it off as regular exhaustion. In reality, twenty-four hours are not enough to meet all the expectations placed on them, which means they must compromise on their time for rest.

With her work set up at home, the boundaries between the two are constantly blurred. Even at the dinner table, Tabinda finds herself sorting out appointments for the next day. “Even when I sit down, my mind is still on work,” she elucidates.

The normalisation of exhaustion and the constant absence of a clear boundary between work and rest do not remain confined to the present. For these women, this experience may even lead them to romanticise their routines when narrating them to their children later in life. Alternatively, more quietly, they may become part of the same cycle that once shaped them - one in which labour is normalised and expectations are inherited rather than questioned. As authority within the household shifts, so too can the expectation that younger women should carry a similar burden.

In many South Asian households, roles are often learned through repetition rather than reflection. What is endured becomes familiar, and what becomes familiar is rarely interrupted. Because these women would have experienced pressure themselves, they may end up passing on parts of that same pressure to those who come after them, not always out of intention.

As long as the efforts of Rubab, Khadija, Tabinda and Zarmeen continue to be considered simply “help” or something that should fit into everything else without disruption, their work will remain structurally invisible, regardless of its contribution to sustaining the household. The problem is not only the volume of labour they carry, but also its categorisation as “background work,” when it is just as central to the functioning of the home as external work.

*Name has been changed to retain privacy.

Bazigah is a journalist who is passionate about uncovering societal issues, cultural dynamics and the nuanced portrayal of women in South Asia. She can be reached at [email protected]