MEET Denise, a 30-something attorney living in New Jersey. Denise has two small children and a large house in a suburban area. Until a year ago, when her son was born, Denise worked at one of the largest law firms in the US.

She met her husband at Columbia Law School; they married after graduation and for years lived in a chic but tiny apartment in New York City. Children brought complications; the apartment was too small and Denise's litigation calendar as well. A second pregnancy forced some choices and decisions. Like many before them, Denise and her husband left the city and moved to the suburbs; the temptations of closets bigger than their entire apartment and a three-car garage exerting their magnetism. With the arrival of the second child, Denise went on maternity leave and fortuitously her husband was promoted with a hefty pay raise.

The Sunday before Denise was to return to work, she looked down at her new baby daughter and made a choice. She would not go back to work. Her husband enthusiastically supported her plan, both knowing that she could always return to work if she wished.

But not everyone in Denise's life was delighted. Her mother, herself a successful lawyer and a partner at a large New York firm, was aghast. She had raised Denise to be a liberated woman, to never be financially dependent on a man, to strive for professional and personal success.

In an instant, it seemed to her, Denise had abandoned all the successes her own generation had strived for, denigrated the hard-won liberation from the endless repetitious agony of childcare and housework. Her efforts to raise a strong independent woman had obviously failed.

Denise's story is not an uncommon one among upper middle-class women in the United States. The victories of feminism won a generation earlier, the rights of women to be in graduate school, to evade the glass ceiling in corporations and law firms, of laws against harassment and discrimination, have been a reality throughout their lives. Their achievements are no longer novel.

Many like Denise cannot quite imagine a world where they may be denied admission to law school, or be expected to exclusively cook and clean for the household without ever dreaming of a career. Theirs is the cult of post-feminism whose adherents rankle at the idea that feminism demands that they do this or that, to be constantly vigilant about men usurping their rights; the true goal is to provide women with choices.

If you had a chat with Denise, she would insist that the man-hating rigidity of her mother's generation is redundant and overzealous; there is no prescription for women's fulfilment and that true freedom is the ability to choose even if the choices mean a return to tradition.

For many American women like Denise, the feminist demands for equality are archaic relics of a different age where men never cooked and women wore aprons; where a few steps back into homemaking could eviscerate the hard-won freedoms of gender parity.

In Pakistan, post-feminists belong predominantly to two groups each affording their own indigenous flavour to its prescriptions. The first are the men and women of the religious right. For them, the return of some western women to traditional roles is ample proof that feminism or the quest for equality was misguided in the first place; women and men are different and their inherent abilities require the former to be child-bearers and homemakers and the latter breadwinners.

The post-feminist elevation of 'choice' allows them to further insist that even overtly oppressive acts, the wearing of the niqab, the acceptance of polygamy and the wilful avoidance of the public sphere are in fact 'choices' and in being so brave acts of liberation deserving of commendation.

New members of this group include elite urban women whose midlife religious awakenings have delivered a newfound infatuation with male dominance, its attendant intricacies presenting a project more substantial than redecorating the living room.

The second category consists of young women who try to digest as choices what they know to be constraints. These include young Pakistani mothers with degrees in medicine and marketing — women who worked until and even after they were married but find it nearly impossible to do so after starting a family.

Sitting with their toddlers inside stuffy apartments, hard-won realms of privacy from meddling in-laws, they are condemned to becoming the mother-in-law-hating, child-development-obsessed women they scoffed at a few years ago.In these dismal times, it helps to imagine that they have 'chosen' their situation and could just as easily return to a professional career even if they know that such a plan, which would require reliable childcare, a cooperative husband and understanding employers, is but a fantasy. The arguments of suburban New Jersey cannot so easily be transported to Karachi.

The clash of feminisms occurs thus when post-feminist critiques originating in the West are unthinkingly transported to contexts where empowerment is but a dream, where public spaces do not belong to women and where any few shreds of freedom are largely a function of wealth.

In western countries, the vigilance and political activism of several generations of women has created a social environment where true choices can be made and traditional roles rediscovered.

In Pakistan, where history, politics and society are almost exclusively constructed by men, post-feminism conveniently allows for the perpetuation of restrictions on women's self-realisation under its intellectual umbrella. n

The strictures of tradition and culture never were destroyed, but must be loved anew. Caught in an anachronism imposed by a connected world, the sad consequence of this clash means that Pakistani women are abandoning equality as passé and feminism as irrelevant before ever having tasted the fruits of its promise.

The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com