Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work

By Sally K. Gallagher

Drawing on fieldwork that spans nearly twenty years, Making Do in Damascus offers a rare portrayal of ordinary family life in Damascus, Syria. It explores how women draw on cultural ideals around gender, religion, and family to negotiate a sense of collective and personal identity. Emphasizing the ability of women to manage family relationships creatively within mostly conservative Sunni Muslim households, Gallagher highlights how personal and material resources shape women’s choices and constraints concerning education, choice of marriage partner, employment, childrearing, relationships with kin, and the uses and risks of new information technologies.

Gallagher argues that taking a nuanced approach toward analyzing women’s identity and authority in society allows us to think beyond dichotomies of Damascene women either as oppressed by class and patriarchy or as completely autonomous agents of their own lives. Tracing ordinary women’s experiences and ideals across decades of social and economic change, Making Do in Damascus highlights the salience of collective identity, place, and connection within families, as well as resources and regional politics, in shaping a generation of families in Damascus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9780815651901

Book preview

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Introduction

Getting beyond the Stereotypes

The man is the head, but the woman is the neck.¹

—Syrian proverb

Su‘ad leaves for work at six thirty in the morning, walking ten blocks through congested streets to the microbus stop. It is already starting to get warm by the time she arrives at work an hour later, just in time to help open the workshop. When we met, she had been working in the shop for two years, doing cross-stitch and designing clothing and other small items that will eventually be sold in a shop in the Old City and to the international community via a number of fairs and cultural displays. This job pays well—her salary has increased gradually with her responsibilities—and is much more acceptable to her family than working in the shirt-making factory down the street. Yet she feels increasing pressure from her family to stop working outside their home. Her brother has become more vocal in his objections to her independence and in a loud argument last week struck her and threatened to disown her if she failed to comply and quit her job. He says it is ruining my chances for marriage. He says he hears rumors that I have been talking with men on the microbus. He tells my father he should compel me to stay home.²

Like many other working-class Palestinians, Su‘ad lives with her family in a refugee camp on the edge of Damascus. The word camp conjures images of dusty tents and hastily constructed temporary shelters, yet this thriving residential and business community in Damascus is indistinguishable from other working- and middle-class sections of the city. In place of tents, multilevel apartment buildings, busy shops, galleries, schools, and businesses branch off of the two main roads that make up the center of the area. Su‘ad’s family has lived here for three generations. She is the second oldest of eight children; her grandmother gave birth to ten; she hopes to marry and have two or three.

When Su‘ad was in tenth grade, she had hoped to go to college, but her grandfather became ill, and she was asked to take on more responsibilities for younger siblings so that her mother would be free to take care of him. After a time, she fell behind in her studies and eventually dropped out of school before taking the baccalaureate exams that determine one’s course of study at the university. I could go back and take the examinations, and, God willing, I would do well enough to go to the university, but it is too difficult. I have to study and work in the shop, and the commute is so long. I don’t return home until late, and then we must visit our relatives. It is too much. And now my older brother is compelling me to stay home. ‘You must stay home!’ he says. He shouts, he threatens. My mother says he is trying to take care of me. To make sure I do not ruin my chances for a good marriage. I cannot even lift a finger without his permission.

The city of Damascus is like a gray wave running up the side of Mount Qasayoun. Khadija lives halfway up this mountain in the area known as Muhajareen, the Immigrants, named for the waves of rural immigrants who came to Damascus over the past forty years looking for work. Housing was cheaper for a time in Muhajareen, and the area literally expanded up the hillside until the rock face was too near vertical to build. The view from Khadija’s balcony is stunning. In the summer, it is somewhat cooler in Muhajareen than in the confines of the city below, and we sit and drink tea and eat freshly cut apples and apricots and talk for hours.

Khadija is thirty-three now. When we first met, she was eighteen. She was a top student in high school and had done well enough on her baccalaureate examination to enter the medical program at the University of Damascus. Although her family had limited resources (two of her brothers were already working in the Persian Gulf to save for marriage and send bits of money home), her parents had enough to cover the cost of her books and supplies. Because the university itself was free to any student who qualified and agreed to work for the government for four years on completion of their degree, Khadija was delighted to attend. Her older brother was a student and accompanied her on the microbus each way. His company made it difficult for her to meet young men, but that would not matter. By the time she was fifteen, her parents had already been receiving regular requests from suitors who were known to the family. Widening the marriage pool to strangers at the university would hardly be necessary.

At age twenty, the pressure was mounting for Khadija to accept one of these offers of marriage.

They said, Why should you study? Here is a good man. His family are relatives of ours from the village. He has a good job and will support you. Why should you bother yourself with studying? But I said, No, I like to study, I like medicine. But they kept asking. It was like a dripping faucet. It made me crazy! When will you marry? Why don’t you marry? What is wrong with Muhammad? What is wrong with Husam? What’s wrong with Kareem? His is a good family. Why bother yourself studying? Eventually I gave in. Bassam is a good man. He is kind to me. He never raises his voice. We are very happy!

Khadija gave birth to a girl the year after she married. Eighteen months later she gave birth to a son. She is hoping not to be pregnant again for a couple of years and is thinking about taking contraceptives but is concerned about rumors she has heard that they make it very hard to conceive again. For now, however, she says, It is enough! I love my children—Amal and Ahmad are a gift from God! But I get so tired! Bassam works so much and is never home. He is at the video shop from nine until two in the afternoon. He buys groceries and bread for me on the way home and relaxes while I make lunch. After he naps, he goes back to work from five thirty until almost ten. Then we eat and go to visit either his parents or my parents. We have no car, and with the children it is exhausting!

Below Mount Qasayoun, where the city begins to flatten and spread toward the horizon, is the area known as Abu Rummaneh. The embassy district. The high-rent zone. The place for elite shopping and dining. Here in a penthouse apartment reached by a glass- and marble-lined elevator is the home of Madam Ghaliya, wife of a high-ranking government official, daughter of a major export family. She just turned forty-five and is beginning to take German-language classes to supplement the French she learned while in school in Lebanon. Her four children are nearly grown—one son is doing mandatory military service; a second is starting his career as a dentist; the third is studying in Ft. Lauderdale; and her only daughter is hoping to travel to Germany to visit relatives before starting the foreign-language and literature program at the University of Damascus.

I arrive at nine in the evening for a women’s munaqisha—a discussion group that meets twice a month. Madam Ghaliya’s cook has prepared a table full of delicacies for the women to enjoy, including a wide range of Middle Eastern hors d’oeurves, imported chocolates, and pastries from the local French bakery. Her friends arrive in ones or twos, their drivers parking their cars on the street below or arranging to come back to pick them up when the meeting is over. Removing the dark trench coats and head scarves that mark their public status as conservative Muslim women, they reveal stylish suits, leather slacks, sequined sweaters, spiked heels, and jewelry worthy of royalty. These women are the Syrian equivalent. They are not just wealthy, they are Shami—members of families that have lived in Damascus for generations. Damascenes of the upper class. They take seriously their noblesse oblige, and although this particular group began as a religious study group in which a woman taught them the meaning of the Qur’an, tonight they are meeting to talk about a cultural exhibition that will raise money for a local orphanage.

Three hours later as the meeting winds down, the women sip thick unsweetened coffee in gold and blue demitasse cups, smoke and talk of husbands. They trade jokes in rapid succession: My husband is gone so much, he is never at home when I am at home. In the morning, I see him and ask, ‘Who are you?’ My husband watches the first ten minutes of a movie, then falls asleep and wakes when it ends and asks, ‘What happened?’ When my husband watches television, he goes like this (blinking her eyes in rhythm as her thumb pumps an imaginary remote control). My husband thinks I’ve gone out to visit a relative. I told him, ‘I’m going out to see my friends.’ He said, ‘No!’ So I told him I was going to my sister’s house and came here instead! The phone rings, and Ghaliya says to the woman who had just spoken, It’s your husband! The talking abruptly stops until the women realize it’s a joke and burst into relieved laughter—all but the one for whom the joke appears too close for comfort. Ghaliya leans over to me and says, It is good for us to laugh, but you know all these women are afraid of their husbands.

Why are these women’s lives so very different? Why are they so very much the same? Is social class what matters? Do material resources and what we do with them determine the outcome of our lives? Or are family, religion, ethnicity, and local culture the factors that make us who we are?

Not much has been written about women in Damascus, Syria.³ The country remains politically and economically isolated from much of the rest of the world. For two generations, it has been governed by a strong state whose internal security personnel have stifled political dissent. It is best known in the West, perhaps, as a harbor for terrorists and for its persistent opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestine. Why, then, study Syria at all, especially Syrian women who have such limited influence on the country’s political and economic life? One reason is that Syria continues to play an increasingly significant role in the politics and economy of the Middle East, which is even more the case after the war against Iraq that began in 2003 weakened that nation’s claim to regional dominance. There clearly is room for knowing more about this powerful but relatively isolated nation and its culture, particularly as it moves into a new era following the protest movements that began to reshape regional politics during the Arab summer of 2011.

Syria’s place in international relations, however, is not the main focus of this book. Instead, I focus on a second reason for studying Syria: the ways in which the policies of a strong state, a struggling economy, local culture, religion, and family values shape the lives of ordinary women, particularly around questions of gender. For forty years, Syria’s commitments to the Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party, for example, opened educational opportunities for women that rivaled those available in the West. Yet relatively few women have been able to translate those opportunities into long-term employment. At the same time, two decades of uneven development and rising prices have made it more and more difficult for families to live on men’s wages alone—opening a host of questions about the appropriateness of women’s employment at a time when families must generate additional income simply to stay afloat. Religion as sets of practices, beliefs, and communities also shapes decisions about work and family, as do individual families’ subcultural values. Although none of these factors is unique to Syria, Syria does provide a window through which to observe the intersections of personal identity, on the one hand, and local culture, religion, resources, and ideas about gender, on the other. Those intersections are the primary focus of this book.

Conceptualizing Gender, Structure, and Agency

Over the past two decades, research and theorizing about gender has undergone something of a paradigm shift. Although some research continues to conceptualize gender as consisting of roles learned in childhood and reinforced by the social organizations and institutions inhabited by adult women and men, the ascendant paradigm is that gender is a fluid construct—one that is constantly created and re-created in the everyday interactions of women and men. The latter more microsocial or phenomenological perspective captures the ongoing, negotiated character of gender, but it represents a shift away from studies that emphasize the consequences of social structure for the social construction of gender. Although providing rich descriptions of gender as emerging out of ongoing social processes, it obscures the effects of less negotiable aspects of social structure, such as social class or religion on gender ideals and behavior.

Exploring the work and family narratives of a subset of women in Damascus highlights the material, social, and cultural resources that are the necessary context within which women negotiate, manage, and leverage gender. Women’s identities, embedded in a collective sense of self and expressed in narratives of gender dependency, are the specific subject of this book. What we learn from them, however, reaches beyond to broad and enduring questions about the relationship between social structure and personal agency.

One set of conceptual tools that provide leverage for this task is William Sewell’s (1992) theorizing on structure and agency as well as recent work theorizing culture as moral narratives (C. Smith 2003; Vaisey 2007). Building on the work of Anthony Giddens (1979) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Sewell argues that social structures are sets of schemas (generalizable sets of more or less formal rules and meanings that orient action) and resources (both material and personal) that tend to be reproduced through human action but that also embody possibilities for their own transformation. In an effort to avoid both materialistic and linguistic overdeterminism, Sewell develops a theory of structure in which there is room for human agency and thus the potential for change. Agency, he argues, involves the ability of minimally competent members of a society to apply cultural schemas creatively to new contexts and situations, coupled with the ability to reinterpret and mobilize resources. The potential for change exists within social structures themselves because the application of schemas to new situations and the consequences of action for the accumulation of resources are not entirely predictable. For example, enacting a cultural schema regarding the completion of an educational program may or may not lead to greater earnings. To the extent that education results in greater earnings as expected, the schema or rule regarding the value of education tends to be validated and reinforced. To the extent that schemas are not validated by the outcomes of action, they are likely to become subject to revision and change.

Access to resources (whether human or material) is central to this concept of structure because it is differences in access to resources (whether across age, gender, race, or class) that form and limit the effective exercise of agency. Although some researchers have argued that the human and nonhuman resources available in everyday life are important in the construction of self (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Gubrium and Holstein 1995), they do not provide an adequate account of differences in individuals’ abilities to manipulate, manage, or define these resources (issues of power), as does the approach offered by Sewell.

Conceptualizing social structure as schemas and resources provides a context for understanding the experiences of women in Damascus because work and family decisions take place at the intersections of personal identity, normative family ideals, class, and a particular political economy. Broad moral narratives or moral orders (C. Smith 2003; Vaisey 2007) represent salient and compelling schemas that affect action and its ends. Religion is a subset of these moral narratives—providing a clear practice and set of ideals regarding family, identity, and responsibility. What this book highlights are the ways in which moral narratives or schemas around gender are embodied and enacted within families with different sets of resources. I seek to account for both the broad sweep of religiously and politically based narratives as well as how the shoulds and goods of those moral orders are interpreted and put into practice in ordinary life. Assessing women’s choices and experiences across social class brings back into focus the significance of state and economic institutions in reinforcing a particular (moral) gender narrative as well as women’s ability to leverage both schemas and resources in ways that create a space for their lives.

Perspectives on Women in the Middle East

As with broad theories of gender, perspectives on women in the Middle East have also undergone some dramatic transformations. Earlier Orientalist depictions of Middle Eastern women as unidimensional, oppressed victims have been challenged by rich ethnographic portrayals of women’s lives. Elizabeth Fernea’s early ethnographic work in Iraq (Fernea 1965) and Morocco (Fernea 1975), and a number of groundbreaking edited collections (Beck and Keddie 1978; Fernea 1985; Fernea and Bezirgan 1977) did much to broaden our understanding of the range of women’s experience in the region. Histories of women’s involvement in nationalist movements and the transformations and fusing of family ideology with nationalist agendas have expanded understanding of the intersections of media, politics, culture, and class (Badran 1996; Baron 1994, 2005; Frierson 2004; Pollard 2005).

As interest in women in the Middle East has grown, research has generally adopted one or the other of two broad analytical approaches to questions of culture, gender, and political economy. On the one hand, women’s identity, the resources on which they draw, and the limitations they encounter have been conceptualized as the product of Muslim culture. From this perspective, Islam is understood as the most salient aspect of women’s identity and as the implicit ideological framework around which women’s lives are organized. On the other hand, in response to growing interest in gender and international development, a second theme has focused on global economic trends and their consequences for gender and development in the Arab world. From this perspective, international development projects and globalization strengthen or weaken the local economy and provide the push for families to rethink appropriate employment for women.

Both of these themes in the literature have helped broaden perceptions of women in the Middle East and have begun to identify women’s roles in the larger political economy. Before going on to describe the ways in which this study builds on and extends previous research, I want to explore in more detail the contributions and limitations of each of these approaches.

The Culture and Worldview of Islam and Women’s Lives

In order to counter stereotypes of Muslim Arab women as victims of an oppressive patriarchy and in response to emerging themes of gender as a negotiated and contested social construction, one strand of research on women in the Middle East begins with the premise that Islam, as a religious worldview, is the core construct of women’s identity and experience. Deniz Kandiyoti nicely summarizes this recurrent theme by arguing that the connection between Islam and cultural authenticity has produced a literature either denying that Islamic practices are necessarily oppressive or asserting that oppressive practices are not necessarily Islamic (1996, 9).

Western academic feminists as well as indigenous scholars can be found on both sides of this argument. In one version, Muslim Arab women emerge as protected, honored, and respected—a fairly advantaged position vis-à-vis women in the West (who, although more autonomous, are described as suffering from greater sexual and economic vulnerability and exploitation). Arguments for the benefits of Islamic ideals for women and family life began to be made in the mid-1970s and addressed themselves in part to growing concern over the viability of the contemporary American family (see, for example, Abd al-Ati 1975, 1977; al-Faruki 1975). Other analyses focused on issues related to the legal, economic, and social status of women and were much less likely to be polemic in their approach toward the status of Arab Muslim women (Ahmed 1982; Nazim 1989; Sabbagh 1996; J. Smith 1984). Particularly important are debates on the conceptualizations of human rights that contrast Enlightenment notions of autonomy and rational individualism with more corporatist or religiously based ideals (Afkhami 1995; Barazangi 1996; Hazou 1990).

Another body of research that adopts the perspective that Islam is the most salient cultural dimension affecting women’s lives makes the case that patriarchal practices are based on misinterpretations of the ideals of an ethical and egalitarian Islam. Conservative Islamist movements, they argue, are built on pre-Islamic ideas rather than on the revelations to the Prophet, which included provisions for the protection and rights of women that were absent in other religious communities (Alvi 2005; Mernissi 1987, 1991a, 1991b; Moghadam 2003). This revisionist argument for a critical re-reading of Islamic texts is reflected in Barbara Stowasser’s Women in the Qur’an: Traditions and Interpretation (1994), Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam (1993), and Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (1991a) and Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry (1991b). Emerging at a time when Islamist nationalist movements have been gaining popularity throughout the region, feminists’ use of a rhetoric of true ethical Islam offer an avenue of resistance to the more restrictive elements of Islamic nationalism while preserving connections to traditional institutions and ideals.

Economic Development and Gender in the Arab World

A second analytical approach to the study of women in the Arab world has focused not on Islam as the driving force behind women’s lives, but on a set of larger political and economic issues. Emerging at a time when the importance of women was coming to the attention of international development and policy agencies, this literature identifies global economic change rather than religious ideology as the most significant factor shaping women’s lives. In part in response to the United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, feminist scholars during the 1970s and early 1980s began to challenge existing social science paradigms regarding the effects of economic development on women. Beginning with Esther Boserup’s Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) a growing number of studies argued that industrial development did not benefit but rather marginalized women. With notable exceptions (Makhlouf 1979; Youssef 1974), most of the research over the next decade focused on women in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 1983; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Nash and Safa 1985; Salaff 1981; Young, Wolkowitz, and McCullagh 1984). Through these scholars’ efforts, the effects of industrialization on women and the participation of women in a growing global economy began to be recognized. Yet in many cases the effort to incorporate women into mainstream theories of economic development had the unintended consequence of glossing over important regional differences. Although historical analyses of nationalist movements in the Middle East provided extensive and nuanced discussions of the ways in which educational initiatives and popular literature drew on and reified ideals about parenting, patriotism, and public life (Badran 1995; Baron 1994, 2005; Pollard 2005; Russell 2004), much of the early research on women in development tended either to omit women in the Middle East as a regional foci or to lump all women together in global analyses of third-world women.⁴

For the most part, however, research on international economic development has given minimal attention to the diversity of women’s experiences in the Middle East or to the effects of religion in shaping women’s status and well-being (Khoury and Moghadam 1995; Lazreg 1990; Moghadam 1998, 2003; Shami 1990; Tucker 1993). What this research does do is to highlight a number of factors other than religion that are significant for understanding the range and limits of women’s choices. Among these factors are class, kinship, household, gender, the state, and position in the world economy. I discuss each of them briefly later in this chapter and in more detail in subsequent chapters, but it is important to remember that each overlaps and connects with the others in multiple ways, so that, for example, it is impossible in the end to discuss the importance of class without considering educational policy or family resources.

Prioritizing Globalization, State Policies and Social Class. Rather than religion or culture being the primary factors that shape women’s lives, macrolevel world-systems analyses give priority to economics and politics as the stage on which cultural factors play themselves out. Religion is important, to be sure, but from a world-systems perspective religion’s role as a cultural system must be understood within a broader framework of political and economic development. For example, Valentine Moghadam (2003) downplays the relative significance of religion and argues that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and reductions in international aid after the breakup of the Soviet Union are key to understanding the social and employment opportunities that are available to women throughout the region. These modernizing states are ostensibly supportive of women’s education and employment. Yet even when women are able to obtain higher levels of education, there are few jobs that most women think of as appropriate because religious conservatism and ideas about women’s domesticity discourage women’s employment (Sonbol 2003).

Other world-systems scholars argue that the state itself may draw on religious and other culturally based ideals about what is appropriate for women as a way to reinforce the legitimacy of a fragile regime (Charrad 2001; Kandiyoti 1991; Lazreg 1990). A state may encourage women to participate in public demonstrations, pursue higher education and employment, or dress in Western styles to buttress the idea that the state is a modern republic whose laws support individual rights and the participation of all citizens in a wide range of professions and political activities. Or a state may implicitly advocate women’s domesticity or conservative dress in public in order to reinforce support among conservative Muslim constituencies or to strengthen ties with more conservative Islamic regimes. In both of these cases, what is considered important is not religion per se, but the uses of religious symbols and language as a means to enhance popular support for the state.

The connections between social class and broader patterns of economic development are also important for understanding women’s opportunities and well-being. From this perspective, economic development limits women’s access and control over the product and process of production and provides few benefits to women overall. Jobs in manufacturing and the service sector may provide additional income for households, but they also rigidly structure women’s time, pay chronically low wages, and have few (if any) benefits or protections for workers. Work within these occupations is often monotonous and repetitive and may require long hours in physically harmful or unhealthy conditions. Even self-employment in the informal sector (doing piecework at home or petty sales or services in the community, for example) provides limited income and few benefits for women (Lobban 1998; Mies, Bennholdt-Thompsen, and von Werlhof 1988; Moghadam 1995). This line of research makes the case that those who control economic and political resources shape what is seen as appropriate cultural and symbolic capital. Viewed through this lens, both culture and the state act in ways that intentionally and unintentionally serve larger national and global economic interests that are often at odds with the interests of women or their families.

Prioritizing Kinship and Women’s Unpaid Labor. A final strand of research on women in the Middle East is one that shifts the focus away from macrosocial structures and institutions toward more middle-level phenomena such as kinship, family, and households. The larger and middle-range structures are not unrelated, of course, because historic capitalism has given rise to modern households as well as to modern states (Smith and Wallerstein 1992; Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984). Yet this approach is important because it turns the question of modernizing upside down by asking how household strategies are connected to and affect state policies and programs of development rather than the reverse.

Using this bottom-up approach, one line of fruitful research has explored women’s responsibilities and everyday household life (Early 1993; Fernea 1995; Rugh 1997), including the degree to which household employment strategies are directly affected by state policies around employment (see, for example, Hoodfar 1997; Singerman 1995; Singerman and Hoodfar 1996). Much of this work blends ethnographic methodologies with feminist concerns that household politics matter. Homa Hoodfar (1997), for example, provides a political and economic framework for her analysis of women’s marriage choices, household finances, and relations among kin. Annalies Moors similarly analyzes the intersections of Islamic ideals around property, class, and gender—making the case that placing property at the center (1995, 259) and examining women’s experiences across urban–rural lines and social class make it possible to avoid cultural essentialism in assessing the influence of both structural constraints and women’s agency in strategies of employment and family life. Others make the case that exchanges of financial help and support create networks of kin and fictive kin that are central to women’s sense of identity and economic security (Joseph 1978; White 1994).

Familiar Questions, a Distinctive Lens

Although there are many reasons to be interested in women in the Middle East, the questions around which this book centers echo enduring themes that apply well beyond the lives of women in an ancient city in a large and diverse region: the degree and ways in which individual lives are constrained by social and economic resources; how women and men make sense of and garner meaning from the work and family choices within their reach; how cultural values, lived religion, and state policies intersect both to empower and enable as well as to constrain individuals’ creative agency.

With the intent of building on and extending the best lines of this previous research, my aim is to bring back into focus a larger point about how social structures and their intersections with culture are central to understanding questions about gender, agency, and identity. Syria offers several distinct advantages that allow me to explore these questions within the context of a subset of families and to highlight particular pieces of this story. Because Syria has been a strong state, its policies regarding employment and gendered opportunities in employment are easily brought into focus. My fieldwork in Damascus provided access to families with different social locations vis-à-vis their relative access to resources—from working poor to political elites and a range of families in between. In addition, by exploring the gender rules within a culture that is different from the West, the contrasts, mechanisms, and processes through which gender rules are maintained are more apparent than might otherwise be the case. This does not at mean that an other culture is easier to understand or simpler than one’s own—only that contrast allows highlights to be more easily identified than is the case when the view is more familiar.

Central Themes

In the following chapters, I explore a number of specific questions. First, how do the resources that vary for women at different levels of society affect the ways in which they interpret their normative culture around gender? Syria is a diverse mosaic of religious and ethnic identities. The majority of the population is Sunni Muslim, and nearly all of the women who are the focus of this analysis are located within that broad community. Women draw on, appeal to, and leverage religious and cultural scripts in a multitude of ways. How do these strategies vary across social class? More specifically, how do women negotiate the space between traditional gender schema or norms and both the needs of their households and their own needs? Among the working poor, scarcity of resources raises the stakes of the game by focusing strategies on a more essential range of goods and relationships. For women with moderate or more ample resources, the need for income may be less acute, yet the need to develop a meaningful identity and to do so with integrity vis-à-vis normative gender ideals remains enormously important. Across social class, resources shape how women enact, bend, and negotiate schemas around gender identity, dependency, family, and work.

A second focus turns these questions around and asks how the social structure of Syria forms and limits the parameters within which women who have little, moderate, or ample resources manage gender schema, employment, and identity. Here I assess how larger political-economic changes affect how women manage messages about gender and the growing need for additional income as well as their own sense of collective identity vis-à-vis broader family ties. At the center of this puzzle is the relationship between agency and social structure that we see playing out at the intersections of gender narratives and personal access to resources.

A final issue that threads its way throughout the book is the relationship between socioeconomic structures and women’s networks of family and friends. Kinship and neighborhood networks are an essential part of life in the Middle East (see, for example, Davis 1985; Joseph 1985; Rugh 1984, 1987), as they also are in the United States (DiLeonardo 1987; Gerstel and Gallagher 1994; Nelson 2005; Stack 1974). Women are key players in these networks of exchange, using them to distribute money, labor, goods, and information. Networks not only serve to distribute resources according to need but also create and solidify a sense of self within collectives of family and friends. Emotional, material, and relational connections across alliances of family and friends are a central and salient facet of life in the Middle East.

Visiting in Damascus

The analysis of structure, gender, and identity within this book is based on fieldwork among families in Damascus, Syria. Between 1992 and 2011, I traveled to Damascus ten times, typically staying from one to four months, spending innumerable hours talking, shopping, drinking tea, preparing meals, and visiting women and their families across the city.⁵ This style of research allowed me to address questions of personal experience, identity, and meaning in a much more fine-tuned way than would have been possible with a larger social survey, even if it had been possible at the time to obtain the required permissions or an adequate response rate in communities unaccustomed to survey research.

I met women in a variety of ways. In most cases, I was introduced through neighbors and friends of friends, gradually entering into networks of loosely connected families in different areas of the city. Because my interest was to understand the intersections of resources and the practice of work and family ideals, I gradually focused my visiting and observations on three groups of women—those whose resources were quite limited, those whose resources were modest but adequate for most dayto-day needs, and those whose resources were more than adequate—in families with elite connections, businesses, or high-level occupations. Most of the poorer women with whom I visited were employed or friends with women employed in two craft projects. These women worked at home or in a central workshop, making cross-stitch garments, pillow covers, purses, and other small items for sale. Through the informal networks of friends and neighbors in several neighborhoods, I gradually became introduced to women whose resources were more moderate, living in middle-income households. Young women in these families attended university, waited for marriage, worked as teachers or in offices, or cared for younger siblings at home. My introduction to women at the upper end of Damascus’s class structure was enhanced by my status as a Fulbright visiting scholar affiliated with the American Cultural Center. Beginning with those connections, I was introduced to women whose husbands worked in government ministries, owned significant enterprises, were instrumental in establishing new technologies or trade, held positions in the government, were philanthropists, or occupied other positions of social or cultural influence. Periodic guest lectures to students at the American Language Center provided entrée into other households at the upper end of Damascene society.

Overall, this method of locating families produced something of an intentional snowball sample. It was systematic in terms of making an effort to connect in a focused way to sets of families in different social locations, and through expanding networks of acquaintances that group developed into a relatively stable set of women with whom I regularly visited, bounded by a larger group of women with whom I had periodic but less focused interactions, and copious amounts of field notes based on occasional or one-time observations and interactions.

Because of the expectation that visits be frequent and unhurried, I spent whole afternoons, evenings, and sometimes entire days with particular families. It quickly became apparent that my sample could not expand indefinitely if I hoped to maintain meaningful regular contact with specific women and their families. In the end, I focused on twenty-eight households distributed relatively evenly across three different levels of society. These households represent the core of a somewhat larger group of fifty-four women with whom I periodically visited and hundreds of other conversations and observations that provide background to the analysis. I visited women mostly at home but also spent hours with them shopping, talking in parks, visiting relatives, eating with a group of friends in a restaurant, or, when practicable, talking with them in their places of employment. Early in the fieldwork, I began with a set of general questions about women’s work and family life and from there let conversations range over the topics and issues women raised—answering as well as asking questions during visits that typically lasted several hours. During subsequent visits,