Title: The Challenges for Middle Eastern Women in the 21st Century
Abstract: Women in the Middle East constitute an important group whose presence in national and regional affairs is growing rapidly, thanks to education and economic change. Although the area's patriarchal ideology is still in place, social practices are contesting that ideology. These social practices, evident in the work place, the home, the courts, the political arena, and the religious sphere are challenging men, women, and other family members to re-evaluate women's role, status, and leadership potential during the next century. The Middle East, during the twentieth century, has been transformed from a territory, loosely governed at local, even roots, levels by a distant Ottoman Emperor, into a collection of some two dozen separate nation states, headed by different kinds of leaders than in the past. The Ottoman Sultan is gone, but so are most of the Kings. The monarchy exists today only in the Gulf, in Jordan, and in Morocco, and it is certainly a very different kind of institution than the absolute ruler of medieval times. It has been the followers, the grass roots movements, combined with some elites, who have challenged the common enemy, the foreign colonial rulers, and successfully achieved nationhood and independence. The area's leaders still constitute a patriarchy, but the idea of shared leadership has had an effect, whether it has been with the formation of consultative assemblies (the Gulf), elected parliaments (Jordan, Egypt), or ideologically based parties (Libya and Iraq). Today new kinds of developments are apparent in the leader-follower equation. Thus, we might ask now that we have reached 2000 what other kinds of developments in leadership might be expected in the region. I would argue that one category of followers has in recent decades become more important and more participatory. At the dawn of a new century, this group is actively competing at different levels, for positions of power and/or leadership in the Middle East. I refer to women. Women constitute at least half of the population of the Middle East today. They are no longer passive accepters of the status quo, of the ideology that men are in charge of women. They are participating and struggling at every level for jobs, promotions, improvements in standard of living and, political clout. How and why? Why should women, as a group, be considered competitors for power and leadership in the next decades and centuries? Are they not, ideologically speaking, under the control of men, their fathers, husbands and sons, the patriarchy? The answer, quite simply, is that the stated ideology of men dominating women is being contested by social practice. This has occurred as a result of a number of processes. To begin with, we are no longer talking in terms of old paradigms like the public/private split (men in the public sphere, women in the private sphere). Though this may have had some validity as a working concept in the long-distant past, my personal belief (expressed frequently elsewhere)1 is that this paradigm was constructed by male social scientists who, banned from studying the private or family sphere, simply discounted the private sphere as unimportant to the world of politics, commerce and religion, and therefore not worthy of study. A further implicit assumption based on the public/private paradigm was that women were kept in the home and their decisions came from there. All that has changed. First of all, women are no longer in the home, which has created problems as well as achievements. This is perhaps the biggest change in the Middle East, a change which has far-reaching implications for politics as well as for the labor market and for family cohesiveness. Incomplete statistics from Tunisia, Morocco, and the Gulf suggest that nearly a third of Middle East women from these countries work full-time outside the home, and that most of the rest work part-time in or out of their homes.2 Further, in many countries, men are absent from their old positions of control. …
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 29
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