Influence of Culture and Religion on Higher Education of Women in Lakki Marwat; A Post Colonial Feminist Theory

Abstract

This paper explores the structural, cultural, and religious issues, which affect women who want to access higher education in Lakki Marwat, a rural area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. Patriarchal traditions and socio-cultural requirements prevent access to education, especially in rural Pakistan, restricting educational access past secondary school (Ullah et al., 2021). Such obstacles consist of gendered mobility and the socio-religious views of the proper female roles (Ullah et al., 2021). The use of a postcolonial feminist approach based on the concepts of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the representation and subalternity generates the foregrounds of the research on the problem of educational marginalization as a product of intersecting inequalities of gender, culture, and religion(Philopedia, 2025) Also compared in the study are the real-life limitations and the idealized freedom of the female character in The Sultana dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a canonical feminist utopian literature, which envisions the liberation of women regarding patriarchal domination. Using the information provided by the questionnaires of a nearby middle level college, this study shows that the attitudes of the communities, cultural ethics, and religion-guided interpretations are all collaborators in limiting women to high learning paths. The results are meant to provide culture-specific interventions to increase involvement of women in higher education in such rural settings

Keywords: Culture, Religion, Higher Education, Postcolonial feminism