SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan -- The women of Uzbekistan face a long, hard struggle to assert their rights in a patriarchal society that demands they submit to beatings and discrimination and resign themselves to a lifetime of drudgery and fatigue.

Unable to stand her husband's violence, Niliufar, 27, fled her home in the tiny village of Chilik and sought refuge with her small daughter at the Umid shelter for women in distress in Samarkand.

Wearing a capacious dress with traditional pants, Niliufar bursts into tears as she remembers her ordeal.

Married by her parents to a farmworker, she soon became the workhorse of the family. Her mother-in-law ordered her to do all the housework, and the strong arm of her husband was called into play for the slightest perceived imperfection.

Tradition requires that young men bring their new brides to live with them in their parents' home. Marriages are often decided in a deal between the two sets of parents, and once a young woman gets married, she leaves her family home forever, AFP reported.

Niliufar has no formal education but at the Umid shelter she can take lessons in carpet-weaving and sewing to become more independent.

But the psychological burden is heavy: she is despised by her old and her new families, and divorce is out of the question.

"In the countryside, there is no way a woman can get a divorce. A family that allowed it would be cast out from village life," said Eldor Amirkulov, an official at the Umid shelter. "We concentrate on persuading husbands to treat their wives properly, intervening with the village elders," he said.

Umid also takes in women who have become pregnant before marriage and want to hide away until they give birth in order not to "discredit" their families.

Bibisara Oripova, the psychotherapist who heads the shelter, seeks to inculcate "leadership" qualities in the women, helping them to assert their rights.

But she is aware that proponents of women's liberation in this traditional Muslim society in Central Asia must tread carefully and devise their own local model.

Towards her own three daughters she is a classic Uzbek mother. She has forbidden them to go to the local discotheque and insisted on them performing their domestic duties.

Dilbara Umarova, a "second-generation emancipated woman" in her fifties who drives an expensive car, agrees that traditional male-female relations must be maintained.

"Obviously the men -- fathers, brothers, husbands -- must be treated with respect. And when there are guests in the house, the men talk and the women serve," she said.

But the economic hardships brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, together with increased access to information, have allowed feminist ideas to make headway, Oripova believes.

"Even in Soviet times women were not allowed to go shopping or to the cinema alone, but no one was bothered by it. When there was money, the discrimination was not felt," she said.

Now, increasingly, women are forced onto their own resources if they and their children are to survive.

Men are finding harder to carry out their role as bread-winner and there are no children's allowances as there were in the Soviet era.

Moreover tens of thousands of women were left to fend for themselves after the widespread arrests of suspected Islamist militants following a wave of bomb attacks in the 1990s, said Talib Yakubov, head of the Uzbekistan Human Rights Organization.

Some 30,000 Uzbek men were illegally sentenced to long terms of prison, he said.

Many women find themselves forced to take on the seasonal work usually carried out by men in Central Asia, even construction work where they are treated "like slaves," Yakubov said.

And for some, the depths are reached when they find themselves forced into prostitution, either in nearby Kazakhstan or further away in Turkey or the United Arab Emirates.