Defying criticisms of ‘unladylike’ behaviour, RFE/RL meets the girls taking to two wheels to claim their independence

“Back in the day, people used to say a girl risked losing her virginity if she fell from a bike,” says Halima, a 61-year-old from the village of Faizbakhsh in southern Tajikistan.



The thought weighs heavily on Halima’s mind as she tries to come to terms with the fact that her own granddaughter rides a bicycle to school every day.

“It’s dangerous,” she says and “it looks especially bad when a woman falls from a bike with her legs up in the air.”

Like anywhere else in the region, cycling has been around for decades, but in rural areas the activity has traditionally been primarily used for work, not pleasure, and definitely not for women.



During Soviet rule, cycling was promoted, and the USSR has a proud history of bicycle production, but since Tajikistan became independent in 1991 riding a bicycle has acquired a social stigma, seen as a sign of low status or poverty.

For women in particular, cycling has traditionally come with many stigmas attached – particularly for those hoping to find a husband.

Halima, who declined to give her full name, says she isn’t alone in her belief that bicycling is unladylike.“There are many other people in the village who don’t like girls cycling,” she says, lamenting that her objections fall on deaf ears.

Conservative views on women’s rights are firmly entrenched in Tajikistan’s rural areas, leading many villagers to consider bicycling inappropriate simply based on long-established gender roles.

Considering the cultural roadblocks, Dildora could be considered somewhat of a cycling pioneer in the village of Qahramon, in Tajikistan’s northern Sughd Province.

Every morning, before daybreak, the 43-year-old woman jumps on her bike and pedals to a nearby family farm to milk the cows and then rush fresh dairy products to the local market.

“I’ve got to finish it all very fast and return home before my children go to school,” she explains. “Then I go back to the market to sell vegetables. Without my bike I wouldn’t be able to cover the distance.”

It wasn’t so long ago that she would have been out of place on the area’s rutted dirt roads. “People would look at me as if I’m out of my mind, they would look down at me when I started riding a bike nearly five years ago,” Dildora says, declining to give her last name. “Everybody would turn their head and look.”

Shifting gears

But changes in Tajikistan’s social landscape have considerably changed popular opinion about bicycles.

Rising prices for cars and gasoline, the dire state or lack of public transportation in remote areas, and the mass departure of men working abroad as migrant workers have made cycling a necessary and viable means of transport for girls and women, many of whom have become family breadwinners.

As a result, seeing a woman in traditional long dress and trousers riding along is no longer uncommon in Qahramon. “It’s a kind of new normal now,” Dildora says. “No one even notices me.”

But Dildora doesn’t see cycling as a sign of women’s liberation, and she isn’t pedalling to save the environment or for her health. “For me it’s a choice made purely out of necessity,” she says. “I’d buy a car if I had money.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donkeys as well as bicycles are used by women to transport goods in Tajikistan’s rural areas. Photograph: Stringer Russia/Reuters

With no school bus or public transportation available in Vakhsh Province, local schoolgirls depend on bicycles to get to class.

Many pupils ride up to five miles to reach Dehqonobod, where the only secondary school in the area is located.

Upon arriving at their school, one group of schoolgirls says there is not a single girl in the area who can’t ride a bike.

Sharifamoh Qosimova, a 17-year-old student, says she cycles to achieve her dream of becoming a doctor. “I need to study hard and I can’t afford being late to school,” she says as she parks her bike near the whitewashed wall of the one-story school building. “Without a bike it would have been completely impossible for me to get to school on time.”

While reluctant at first, most local parents have resigned themselves to reality, bought Chinese-made bikes for their daughters, and taught them how to ride.

But that doesn’t mean Halima – whose granddaughter was among the bikers in Vakhsh – is happy about the development.

“It just doesn’t suit a woman to be raising her legs like a man while mounting the bike,” she says.

A version of this article first appeared on RFE/RL