You have $100. Allah Ta'ala says to pay Zakaat on it so you are left with $97.5

1. Allah Ta'ala says that your $97.5 will be blessed and protected and Allah Ta'ala will give you an increase. Allah Ta'ala says that if you give Sadaqa (volunatrily) you will be blessed even more
   
2. Capitalism say you are now left with $97.5 instead of $100. The poor should work hard to earn just like you have, why should you have to give your hard earned $2.5 to help the Poor? Charity, are you crazy? Can you give me tax benefits at least!!!
   

From 1990 when this was a hot-topic...

WOMEN IN THE '90S_PROGRESS, PARADOX AND RETREAT

www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/05/20/women-...

"INVOLVING women in industrial production has led to their developing notions alien to their biological features and proper interests . . . . The most important thing which should be done for women is to help them get back to the environment appropriate to their biology, where they can be fulfilled. And I would dare to suggest that the family is where women are most likely to find real happiness. If women abandon the family, ruin must follow."

So wrote a young Soviet man last year in the Soviet journal Technology and Science. He is not alone in his views. After five years of perestroika and glasnost, similar attitudes fill the press and dominate policy debates about women's role in Soviet society.

Even the enlightened Mikhail Gorbachev sounds alarmingly traditional on the subject of women. "We are now holding heated debates about the question of what we should do to make it possible for women to return to their purely womanly mission," Gorbachev wrote in his 1987 book "Perestroika." Gorbachev has changed his tune a bit since then, speaking recently of wanting women "promoted more widely to leadership work," but he continues to emphasize women's roles as mothers and homemakers rather than as political actors.

Given such views, it is little wonder that perestroika has so far failed to improve Soviet women's secondary position in the workforce or offer relief from the "second shift" they work at home.

For decades, Soviet society's economic hardships have fallen disproportionately on women. Most Soviet women, like their American counterparts, still need to work full-time in order to make ends meet. But they are largely relegated to low-paying positions, are noticeably absent from management posts and earn only two-thirds of what men earn for comparable work.

Beyond that, Soviet women have the additional burden of caring for their families and households with little help from their husbands. A recent survey showed that 275 billion hours a year, equal to 90 percent of the time spent on paid work in the national economy as a whole, are spent on shopping, child-care and housework -- most of it done by women. Women wait in line for scarce goods for up to three hours a day. They have little to no access to the broad range of household services that Americans take for granted.

Not surprisingly, Gorbachev's talk of "a return to a purely womanly mission" does appeal to some Soviet women, exhausted by decades of theoretical emancipation and tired of shouldering the double burdens of work and family. Yet significantly, a national poll last year found that only 20 percent of Soviet women would quit their jobs even if they could afford to.

Measures proposed by the government earlier this year to ease women's burdens on the job have, at the same time, strengthened the traditional belief that they are solely responsible for children and housework. The Communist Party program to "improve the working and living conditions of women," for example, will allow women to work fewer hours a week, release them from heavy work and work injurious to their health

usually the highest paying jobs

and

The idea that men -- indeed, society as a whole -- are also responsible for the family has not been raised by the government. Last month, the Supreme Soviet did decree that, effective in 1991, "fathers, guardians or other family members" could take partially unpaid child-care leave for up to three years. But Valentina Matvienko -- a member of the Supreme Soviet Committee for Women's Issues, Family, Mother and Child Care, which drafted the decree -- is not optimistic: "I know that few men will stay home. They consider raising children women's work."

Nor have authorities dealt with the impact on women of such economic reforms as reducing the 18-million-strong bureaucracy. Early studies show that the first layoffs will hit support staff -- consisting almost entirely of women. Cooperatives, touted as a way to provide services while allowing women flexibility in their work day, generally require 10-to-12-hour days, thereby excluding most women with children. Work brigades, which offer higher wages and benefits for increased efficiency, attract the most productive workers while passing over disabled and older workers and women with children. Even when women try to exercise their legal rights to work fewer hours or a flex-time schedule, employers and work teams frequently resist and pressure them to quit. Since almost all benefits in Soviet society (housing, health, pensions) revolve around one's job, women may well become more dependent on their husbands or families as a result of the reforms.

In the political sphere, perestroika has actually reduced women's representation in the new national parliament and local soviets. While the March 1989 elections were the freest since 1917, women's share of deputy seats fell from 33 percent under previous governments to less than 15 percent in the new People's Congress -- and not a single women was elected in an open race in Moscow. The results would have been even worse had not a third of the 2,250 seats been reserved for establishment organizations, including the Soviet Women's Committee. In the recent local elections to the Russian Republic's Parliament, about 6 percent of the candidates were women as compared to 35 percent in the past. (A poll in the weekly Argumenty i Fakty last year reported that voters considered "being a man" one of the most important qualities in a candidate.) These alarming statistics have sparked a debate about retaining quotas for women during this transitional period so as to help more women get into the grassroots soviets, so important to the new political life of the country.

But glasnost is a double-edged sword. The re-emergence of patriarchal attitudes toward women is offset in part by an upsurge of female activism. Women who have become prominent members of informal organizations and national popular fronts include Marju Lauristin, a leader of the Estonian Popular Front; Kazimiera Prunskiene, prime minister of Lithuania and a former leader in the nationalist movement Sajudis; Tamara Cheidze of the Ilia Chavchavadze Society in Georgia; and Leila Yunusova, a member of Azerbaijan's popular front.

And though there are still no signs of a mass movement, independent women's associations have emerged around the country in the past year. In Moscow, philosopher Olga Voronina established The League for Society's Liberation from Stereotypes (LOTOS), whose members are working on a gender analysis of Soviet society. Olga Besselova, has revived a dormant women's council at the Aerohydrodynamics Institute in Zhukovsky, 60 kilometers outside of Moscow, and organized a Women's Initiative Club, which lobbies the town government for better services, organizes political training workshops, holds weekly lectures and runs consciousness-raising sessions. In March, Besslova organized an Inter-Regional Women's Political Club with affiliates in several Russian cities, which will nominate and support women candidates in local and national races. Elena Ershsova, a research fellow at the Arbatov Institute in Moscow and a specialist on Western feminism, has just opened Gaia, a legal consulting service and a political-leadership training center for women. And Elena Zelinskaya, who started Mercury, the leading ecological group in Leningrad, heads a women's cooperative club, several of whose members ran in the recent local elections, and has just become the new chair of the Leningrad City Council Commission on Communication.

Soviet women are also organizing along professional lines. In 1989, a Federation of Women Writers was formed in the Russian Writers' Union, and women filmmakers, artists and journalists in Moscow have formed associations to lobby for their rights. In Leningrad, Olga Lipovskaya publishes a samizdat feminist journal, Women's Reading, which runs articles by Soviet women about rape, domestic violence, lack of contraception and lesbian rights.

Two weeks ago, leaders of these new non-governmental organizations as well as representatives of the quasi-official Soviet Women's Committee participated in a Soviet-American women's summit in Washington -- a breakthrough in itself, since heretofore only delegations chosen by the latter body could attend international conferences. "We are here at this conference," said LOTOS's Voronina, "because despite all the changes in our country, women remain excluded from positions of political and economic authority." The 25 Soviet and 75 American delegates drafted a document -- "From Day Care to Disarmament: A Vision for the 21st Century" -- for presentation to Presidents Bush and Gorbachev at their summit later this month. It calls for, among other things, the "full and effective participation of women at every level of decision-making" and the establishment of a "joint Soviet-American International Womens Commission, open to women throughout the world, to study, monitor and act on critical issues."

Perhaps the only perceptible, and significant, benefit Gorbachev's reforms have brought women is the freedom to organize, to address the inequalities in the system or, as Olga Lipovskaya, put it "to let steam off." Or as Olga Voronina put it, "In Western Europe and America women's movements have spent 20 years fighting for society to recognize their problems. Here we are only just beginning the process of democratization, and our issue cannot be resolved by decree. Until society changes its view of women and stops reducing their problems to goods shortages, nothing is going to change."

Katrina vanden Heuvel is co-author (with Stephen F. Cohen) of "Voices of Glasnost" (W. W. Norton, 1989) and an editor-at-large of The Nation. Some of the information in this article also appears in a book review by the author in The Nation's current issue.

My wife does not work but this is common phenomenon in the west so a well-known issue so no need to be anonymous.

We have a lot of Sisters who are single parents or in bad marriages and need to augment income so they work or generate some sort of income.

A lot of Sisters go to universities and they are professionals so they are used to working before marriage so they continue afterwards

A lot of Sisters want to work.

I know plenty of practising, pious Sisters (single, married and divorced) who want to work, some don’t but due to circumstances have to.

We don’t pay people’s bills or run their financial affairs so should not second guess their piety or adherence to Deen.