Opinion | Silent Strength Women as the Unseen Pillars of Kashmiri Society

Societies do not survive only on institutions, laws, or economies. They survive on invisible hands that sustain daily life without applause. In Kashmir, these hands belong largely to women. Women whose labour is constant, whose resilience is inherited, and whose silence is often mistaken for passivity. Women’s invisible labour sustains societies everywhere in villages, cities, and in homes across the world. To understand Kashmiri society without understanding its women is to read history with half its pages missing.

From a sociological lens, Karl Marx argued that labour is the foundation of society, yet he warned that when labour is unpaid or unrecognized, it becomes a form of exploitation hidden in plain sight. Kashmiri women perform precisely such labour in domestic, emotional, and social roles without wages, titles, and visibility. Their work produces stability, nurtures future generations, and maintains social cohesion, yet remains outside economic calculations and policy frameworks.

Dr Ali Shariati suggests that the most potent form of oppression is the one that becomes normalized. When the sacrifices of the women were defined as a natural duty, society was absolved of responsibility. Shariati proposed that tradition, if untainted by consciousness, could be a means of insidious domination. Kashmiri women were not invisible by choice; invisibility was a choice imposed on them.

In households shaped by uncertainty, political, economic, or emotional, women become managers of scarcity. They ration resources, negotiate peace within families, absorb collective anxieties, and transform fear into routine.

Max Weber’s idea of meaningful social action applies here: women’s everyday decisions are not mechanical habits, but conscious actions shaped by values, responsibility, and ethical commitment to family and community. Yet because this labour happens inside homes, it is dismissed as private and therefore insignificant. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call this symbolic violence—a system where domination is maintained not through force, but through acceptance. Women internalize the belief that their work is lesser because society treats it as such. And still, they continue.

Kashmiri women are not merely surviving; they are holding society together at its most fragile seams. They raise children who carry the emotional memory of conflict. They care for elders whose lives have seen repeated disruptions. They act as emotional shock absorbers in times of grief. This is not instinct. It is skill, learned through experience and necessity.

An Islamic scholar pointed out that women were never intended to be silent sufferers of the burden but to be a conscious moral force within society. “The power of women is not to be found by emulating men but by discovering her role as a member of society.” But by ignoring the role of women, society steals their dignity and exploits their labour. Allama Iqbal has stated the true situation of women by saying: Wujood-e-zan se hai tasveer-e-kaainaat mein rang, Usi ke saaz se hai zindagi ka soz-e-daroon.

And yet, the very source of this colour is kept unseen. Modern narratives of empowerment often celebrate visibility, careers, leadership, and public success. These are essential and must be encouraged. But when empowerment is defined narrowly, it excludes the majority of women whose strength is exercised in less visible spaces. Empowerment, if it is to be honest, must include the woman who holds a family together with no recognition, no rest, and no safety net.

This silence should not be romanticised. Silence is not consent. It is often the result of exhaustion, social conditioning, and lack of alternatives. True recognition begins not with praise, but with structural change, policies that value unpaid labour, mental health support for caregivers, financial inclusion for women who work from home, and platforms that allow women to speak for themselves. Kashmiri women do not need to be told they are strong. They already know. What they need is a society that stops benefiting from their silence and starts honouring their contribution.

What does recognition must look like?

Recognition must move beyond words to structure. Unpaid care and emotional labour must be acknowledged as real work within legal and economic systems. Women who sustain families, often from within homes and conflict-affected spaces, need social security, healthcare, and financial inclusion. Emotional labour, silently carried by women, requires mental-health support and public recognition.

Most importantly, women’s lived experiences must be given space in media and education, allowing them to speak for themselves rather than be celebrated only as symbols of resilience.

Women’s work has always been portrayed as natural and expected in some sense of the word. Cooking, cleaning, consoling, teaching, and economically providing in informal settings are culturally revered as duties rather than contributions. The globe considers it a given that women will be the ones to bear the burden of sadness, care for the home front, and glue the community together in the face of adversity and dire circumstances. The notion of invisibility of this work is not by chance but design. We don’t put much stock in care work because it’s not economically rewarded, repetitive, and empathy-based labour.

Patriarchal norms reinforce the expectation that women will sacrifice silently, while men’s labour is counted, measured, and rewarded. Silvia Federici has argued that modern economies are built on the exploitation of unpaid reproductive labour, while Friedrich Engels warned that the first form of oppression emerges when women’s domestic labour is removed from social value. Antonio Gramsci reminded us that domination survives not only through force, but through consent shaped by culture. When silence is taught as virtue and endurance as destiny, inequality sustains itself without resistance. Because the backbone of a society should never be invisible. It should be supported, protected, and acknowledged before it breaks.

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