Some Thoughts on Women

There's one subject I've been avoiding because I've been so confused about it, which is the subject of gender in the Muslim world, and how I feel, as a woman, being here. We've written about it a little in specific situations, like in the two Turkish villages we went to, where we could be more detached and factual—women sat here, men sat here, etc. The part that has been more difficult for me is the things I've been feeling. One of them is much angrier and less open-minded than maybe I wanted to believe about myself; when I saw, in Istanbul, on a 95 degree day, a man in short sleeves with a few buttons unbuttoned, while his wife was shrouded completely in a heavy black robe, I felt true hatred for him. Same in the airport in Cairo: this man was in short sleeves, again, and his wife was not only in the black robe, but also had a solid black veil over her head covering her face—it didn’t have even the eye holes that a burka has. She was holding a baby. She looked like a ghost, like she should have been wearing a sign that said "there is not a person here." I almost threw up.

Those are pretty extreme examples, and I think my disdain for them is justified from a human rights perspective. But I also find myself feeling it about the focus on "chastity" and "modesty" of women as a whole. From a western feminist perspective those ideas are used entirely oppressively. However, it's also a problem projecting my theoretical ideas onto everything and everyone—I feel both constantly judged (the basic precept in Egypt particularly but the region more generally being that western women are all prostitutes) and constantly judging, looking at most men here as if they are misogynistic oppressive assholes and most women as if they are weak tools of the oppressors. This clearly is not a way I want to be approaching people, and goes against my own values by stripping people of individuality and agency. This has been weighing on me a lot. One of our first nights in Egypt I dreamed that I was with a woman covered in black and I was supposed to ask her questions about women in Islam—but when I asked, I could never hear anything she said. (My worry that I'm not open to other people's beliefs). And then the next scene in the dream was me at a burka rental store, and I was being put in a burka, and the dream panned out on me screaming. (My fear and hatred of the practice). I haven't fully come to terms with any of this, but it has certainly been an important aspect of my experience here.

One positive outcome of our unsought extra week in Cairo, though, has been that I’ve had the opportunity to read an excellent anthropology of poor women in this city, called Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo, by Homa Hoodfar. The most important lesson from this book, for me, is that to assume it’s possible to know what’s really going on in a society based on certain external appearances is ridiculously arrogant and simple-minded. As an abstract idea, this is something I knew already; what’s been really valuable has been to have felt myself making such judgements, almost against my own will, and then to have Hoodfar’s deeply interesting research shake me back into reality.

The guiding questions in Hoodfar’s book are, what choices do poor Cairene women make in planning for and within marriage, and why do they make them? The key idea is that the women are, indeed, actively making choices, and that these choices are rational in the context of their lives. One example of this is why women who did not grow up wearing the veil took it on. (This was a big trend, called “reveiling”, in the 1980s and 90s, when Hoodfar was doing her research; now, almost all lower and middle class women here are veiled.) Hoodfar found that women in her study often veiled in order to defend their right to work—whereas an unveiled woman going out in the morning or evening alone, or speaking as an equal to men, would garner accusations of “seduction”, a veiled woman would not, and therefore women would veil in order not to bring dishonor to their husbands while still being able to continue doing what they wanted to do (i.e., go to work). Relatedly, Hoodfar found that women would support the traditional gender hierarchy, validated and widely venerated by Islam, in large part because they were able to manipulate their lives within that hierarchy, and feared loss of control if the hierarchy were to change. For instance, the Quran states that a man is the breadwinner for the family, and with this position of responsibility he has various privileges as the family’s head. Hoodfar found that the women at least nominally upheld the “man as leader” idea, in part because they would use it to demand that the man meet his responsibilities of providing for the family’s basic needs; with high rates of illiteracy and extremely low wages in their own jobs, the women could not risk food for their family on demanding to be seen as equals within the marriage. Further, the women in the neighborhood most admired by other women were those who were able to keep up their husbands’ egos and reputations as household heads, while actually controlling most or all aspects of running the household themselves. In effect these women were often undermining the hierarchy, but in word, and when it suited their purposes, they were supporting it. A third example was that of family planning. Hoodfar found that, overall, choices about contraception were made by the women, and that many of them tried to have many children early in the marriage because they considered it a way to “secure” the marriage (which is borne out statistically, in terms of divorce rates) as well as to protect them in old age, as religiously sons are supposed to care for elderly parents, and there is no state social security. Thus, three things that could be seen only as forces of subjugation acting on women are, at the very least, complexified; the women are active, not passive, players.

The other crucial point from Hoodfar’s book is that we must recognize that words and concepts mean very different things in different contexts, and it is not only futile but actively harmful to push one’s own understanding onto other people and situations. (Our friend Henrik is doing his dissertation on a similar topic in regard to dialogue between Christians and Muslims in Egypt, using the theoretical framework of “language games”—meaning, basically, all the unstated social meanings and understandings that words carry, and without which they cannot be truly understood. That is, language never has a pure and simple meaning—it always has a context.) For example, when the women in Hoodfar’s study talk about a “love” or “western” marriage, they mean a marriage based primarily on physical attraction, which they rightly recognize as a tenuous basis for a long-term relationship—but of course when we talk about a marriage of love, physical attraction is only one of many elements we have in mind. The concept of honor as a person’s most fundamental defining characteristic—as the thing most to be protected in one’s life—has little currency in mainstream western cultures. However, it is of the utmost importance to both women and men in Hoodfar’s neighborhood. Similarly, when the women in Hoodfar’s study considered the western possibilities of being single or childless by choice, they found them absolutely incomprehensible, representing utter loneliness and failure as a woman. And their understanding of western society is that men have very little respect for women—we might say the same of theirs. Neither perception can be called true; but, based on the different ways we understand “respect”, both perceptions contain some truth.

To be able to talk about what should happen, you have to really understand what is happening. I am certainly not at that point yet on this topic, and never will be. But after reading, I can no longer look at the women here and see just victims of or participators in oppression. I cannot look at veils, or even fully covering robes, and say they are just tools of oppression. What I can say is that to be pushed into veiling, supporting the gender hierarchy, or having more children than desired, by economic and social circumstances, is wrong. The women act and make choices within the parameters of their lives, but the narrowness of these parameters indicates real failure on the part of the state. I don’t know what the answers are, but I think that a better education system, a decent minimum wage, and a social security program are places to start. It seems that maybe the state doesn’t know what’s really going on in the neighborhoods either. If it weren’t so serious, it could be laughable—the state wants to curtail population growth, which is among the fastest in the world, yet it doesn’t do anything to move toward a social security program, which could prevent poor women from feeling compelled to have many children! Both poor women and poor men (who face many challenges as well, although they aren’t what I’ve been focusing on) deserve a horizon of rational choices, of real possibilities, far greater than what they currently face. Ignorant criticism of their current choices, though, will do nothing to help foster that reality—on the contrary, it will only push it farther away.