| Abstract: |
What are the links between development, social change, and women's status in
the modernizing countries of the Middle East and North Africa? What is the
relationship between socio-economic development, patriarchal structures, and
the advancement of women? I propose that the relationship between development
and women's emancipation is neither direct, automatic, nor unilinear.
Intervening factors such as economic crisis, cultural revivalism, and
political instability could worsen women's status. But I will argue that
development erodes classic patriarchy, even though new forms of gender
inequality emerge and class differences are intensified, and I propose that
the long-term trend is toward less rather than more gender inequality, because
development has provided women (although not all women) with education, paid
employment, access to the public sphere, and a wider range of life-options. I
then turn to the Middle East and North Africa, to examine the ways in which
socio-economic development has benefited women, and the ways in which it has
undermined their position and well-being. In so doing I raise questions about
the "development" process itself, in particular the limits of oil-centered
industrialization, and about the nature of states and state policies in
specific Middle Eastern countries. Unintended outcomes of development and
state policies are considered as well. Since the early 1960s, state expansion,
economic development, oil wealth, and increased integration within the world
system have combined to create educational and employment opportunities
favourable to women in the Middle East. For about ten years after the oil
price increases of the early 1970s, a massive investment programme by the
oil-producing countries affected the structure of the labour force not only
within the relevant countries, but throughout the region, as a result of
labour migration. Since then, the urban areas have seen an expansion of the
female labour force, as women have occupied paid positions in factories and
offices, as workers, administrators, and professionals. Feminist concerns and
women's movements also emerged, and by 1980 most Middle Eastern countries had
women's organizations dealing with issues of literacy, education, employment,
the law, and so on. These social changes have had a positive effect in
reducing traditional sex segregation and female seclusion, in introducing
changes in the structure of the Middle Eastern family, and in producing a
generation of middle class women not dependent on family or marriage for
survival and status. Increased educational attainment and labour force
attachment has created a stratum of highly visible and increasingly vocal
women in the public sphere. The secular trend toward altering and improving
women's work and women's lives seems to have encountered an impasse in the
1980s. The crisis resulted in part from the drop in real prices of primary
commodities, including oil, throughout the 1980s (until the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait in August 1990 raised the price of oil again). According to the UN,
debt as a percentage of GNP for the Middle East and North Africa in 1989 rose
to 70 percent; during the 1980s, the region's debt increased from 4.4 billion
dollars to 118.8 billion dollars. In Israel, the serious economic plight has
been alleviated by massive American aid. But elsewhere, tough economic
reforms, along with poverty, unemployment, and debt servicing have led to a
spate of popular protests and "IMF riots" in Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, and
Turkey.The austerities required by debt servicing and structural adjustment,
social disparities, and political repression have tended to de-legitimize
"Western-style" systems and revive questions of cultural identity, including
renewed calls for greater control over female mobility. It is in this context
of economic failures and political delegitimation that Islamist movements are
presenting themselves as alternatives, with specific implications for the
legal status and social positions of women. Thus on balance it appears that
the economic strategies pursued (excessive reliance on oil revenues, high
military expenditures) and the political mechanisms deployed (authoritarian
rule), have resulted in (a) a limited set of achievements for women, and (b)
social tensions and a conservative backlash with particular implications for
women. This paper will highlight the positive and negative entailments of
development for Middle Eastern women, its contribution to the erosion of the
patriarchal family, and the impasse faced by women in the context of economic
failures and political crisis. |