WOMEN, HEALTH AND ILLNESS

Abstract

Husband’s behaviour towards wife’s health plays a key role in their married life. This is because physical and mental health of a woman not only leads to a happy married life but also play an important role in upbringing of children. This motivates me to research on husband’s behaviour towards wife’s health. In this qualitative ethnographic study, my prime objective is to find the impact of husband’s behaviour towards his wife’s health on their relationship and on their children. Furthermore, I investigated and highlighted the health problems of women in Saidpur village in Islamabad and irresponsible behaviour of husband towards his wife health. The results of my study showed that there are religious, sociological, and economic issues which hinder the provision of health care for women. Also, I found that range of socio-cultural and individual issues woman restrict women’s access to health facilities and role of husband limiting their access to these facilities. Moreover, husband play important and often dominant roles in making decisions that are crucial to women’s reproductive health due to dependency of the low status of women in Pakistani society on their husbands for adequate health care. This study will focus on the cooperation between husband and wife on health issues in a diverse community of Saidpur. This research indicated that, the wife’s health is important as fuel to run a happy family life and the husband’s behaviour plays a very important role to keep her healthy and sound. But issues like social, economic, type of marriage, residential pattern, etc. put several constraints on the husband’s behaviour.