Women, encouraged on the one hand by socio-economic changes which are taking place and on the other hand by a rising level of education, are becoming serious competitors to men in the labour market. Out of every 100 active individuals, 30 are young women.21
The most striking characteristic of Moroccan female labour is its youth; 44 percent of working women are under twenty-five, and 15 percent are under fifteen years old. The corresponding figures for men are 29 percent and 6 percent.
In the services sector there are predominantly two kinds of working women, the civil servant and the maid. There are 27,700 women working mainly for the Moroccan government, 15,200 of whom hold teaching jobs. The integration of women into prestigious activities such as teaching, health, and finance is of particular importance precisely because the bulk of working women are illiterate or semi-literate.
Lack of education forces most women into subordinate positions, under men’s supervision, hardly different from their traditional situations. Maids, for example, occupy such a traditional subordinate position. They are remarkable not only for their numbers (100,200), but also for their age distribution – more than half the maids in Morocco are under twenty-five years old and 29 percent are under fifteen. One of the ominous gifts of modernization, child labour, is due to many factors, but mainly the disintegration of the traditional rural social structure, coupled with the rapid increase in population.
Apart from civil servants and maids, women’s participation in the economy is concentrated in four kinds of activities: agriculture, cattle-raising, and the textile and ready-made clothes industries.
But since official documents define ‘economically active’ so that it includes both people holding jobs and those looking for jobs, a thorough picture of the female labour situation cannot be drawn without looking at female unemployment. According to the official data, the number of people employed has, not risen since 1960, but the structure of unemployment by sex has registered a spectacular change. While the number of unemployed males remained unchanged, the number of women seeking jobs increased tenfold in eleven years. While female unemployment accounted for less than 2 percent of the total unemployment figure in 1960, it reached 21 percent in 1971. The absence of an institutionalized right to work predisposes women to fall prey to unemployment much more easily than their male colleagues. In the cities the rate of activity and the level of unemployment are higher for women than for men.22
The 1971 census defines women working within the household as inactive. Some 2,800,000 Moroccan housewives are considered to contribute nothing to society. And, as the census-takers admit, ‘in rural areas women’s participation in economic activity is confused with housework, and a certain reticence on the part of the husband to declare his wife active was noticed.’23 In 1960 the number of women whose labour was under-reported was estimated to be 1,200,000. A more accurate census would have inflated the number of unemployed people tremendously by adding the ‘under-estimated’ female farm-workers.
Let us now return to the ideological implications of this massive access of women to the job market. The traditional definition of femininity might be reassuring in some respects. The number of unemployed women, for example, is less important than the number of unemployed men because after all the woman’s place is in the home and her husband guarantees her needs, her nafaqa. Since women’s right to work outside the home is still ambiguous, and since the provisions of the Muduwana are clear, the state is obliged to create jobs for men only. To supply jobs for women is therefore not an obligation but an act of benevolent generosity. To keep women in the home, under the control of men, satisfies needs both psychological and economic in a Third World country in which the economy is in deep crisis and is strongly dependent. If the Muslim family, with its territorial sexuality, did not exist, it would have been created. It is thus not difficult to understand the utility of the various conservative arguments advising women to return to the hearths their grandmothers occupied.
Functions of Sexual Repression in a Depressed Economy
Less visible but probably more pernicious than the economic aspect is the psychological function of female oppression as an outlet for male frustration and aggression. Wilhelm Reich drew attention to the functions of the patriarchal family in economically depressed societies. He emphasized that ‘economic freedom goes hand in hand with the dissolution of old institutions’, particularly those ‘governing sexual policies’,24 and that sexually frustrated males are less likely to rebel against economic exploitation.
The suppression of one’s primitive material needs compasses a different result than the suppression of one’s sexual needs. The former incites to rebellion, whereas the latter – inasmuch as it causes sexual needs to be repressed – withdraws them from consciousness and anchors itself as a moral defence, prevents rebellion against both forms of suppression. Indeed the inhibition of rebellion itself is unconscious. In the consciousness of the average nonpolitical man there is not even a trace of it.25
A sexually repressed male is preoccupied with symbols such as ‘purity’ and ‘honour’ because his experience of genital sexuality is ‘dirty’ by his society’s standards and, consequently, by his own standards. For example, the rural Moroccan youth whose sexual desires are savagely separated from their female goals so that he has to choose between sodomy, homosexuality, and masturbation (all equally condemned) is likely to be particularly sensitive to the ideas of honour and purity.
The man who attains genital satisfaction is honourable, responsible, brave, and controlled without. making much of a fuss about it. These attitudes are an organic part of his personality. The man whose genitals are weakened, whose sexual structure is full of contradictions, must continually remind himself to control his sexuality, to preserve his sexual dignity, to be brave in the face of temptations, etc.26
Honour and purity, two particularly sensitive emotional concepts in Muslim North African society, link the man’s prestige in an almost fatal way to the sexual behaviour of the women under his charge, be they his wives, sisters, or unmarried female relatives. 27 A man who has a wife or sister working in an office or going to school is a man who runs a very serious chance of seeing ‘his honour soiled’. He must face the real possibility of suffering the complete collapse of his prestige when one of his women is seen ‘driving around with the boy next door’ after school or office hours. To have men’s honour embodied in women’s sexual behaviour was a much safer system when women’s space was strictly confined to the courtyard and ritual visits to the hammam or the local saint’s tomb. It is no wonder that women who have such tremendous power to maintain or destroy a man’s position in society are going to be the focus of his frustrations and aggression.
Male frustration is likely to be aggravated by the differences in the ways men and women are socialized to handle sexual drives. Men are encouraged to expect full satisfaction of their sexual desires, and to perceive their masculine identity as closely linked to that satisfaction. From an early age women are taught to curb their sexual drives. Little girls are told in detail about the vagina and the uterus, and about the penis’s ‘destructive’ effects on these two parts of women’s bodies. The hammam, where children bathe together with adults, is a normal place for questions and answers about human anatomy. A brother’s circumcision at the age of five is also an occasion for little girls to ask questions. Moreover, grown-ups frequently do not wait until the child asks. They volunteer the information upon which the honour and prestige of the group depend. (As a child I was constantly warned about the implications of my sexual behaviour, and on the occasion of my first period I was treated to a long conference with my mother and oldest aunt. A horde of cousins were set on my trail, assigned to observe my every move between Bab al-Hadid College and the house where I lived.)
The male child is introduced to sex differently. His penis, htewta (‘little penis’), is the object of a veritable cult on the part of the women rearing him. Little sisters, aunts, maids, and mother
s often attract the little boy’s attention to his htewta and try to teach him to pronounce the word, which is quite a task given the gutteral initial letter ‘h’. One of the common games played by adult females with a male child is to get him to understand the connection between sidi (master) and the htewta. Hada sidhum (‘This is their master’), say the women, pointing to the child’s penis. They try to make him repeat the sentence while pointing to his own penis. The kissing of the child’s penis is a normal gesture for a female relative who has not seen him since his birth. Tbarkallah ‘ala-r-Rajal (‘God protect the man’), she may whisper. The child’s phallic pride is enhanced systematically, beginning in the first years of life. And as a boy matures, the fact that men have privileges such as polygamy and repudiation, which allow them not only to have multiple sexual partners but also to change partners at will, gives him the impression that society is organized to satisfy his sexual wishes.
The young man is then confronted with the hard reality of adolescence, when sexual deprivation is systematically organized. He finds that he cannot have a woman if he does not pay the bride-price, a sum he often cannot afford until his mid-twenties, if he’s lucky. If he wants to satisfy his sexual needs, he must break the law and have illicit intercourse. He is likely to be very upset by sexual restrictions he was not told about early enough. In fact, the sexual tragedy, often seen as a female problem, is an equally destructive masculine tragedy, as is clear in the unbelievable sexual misery of many of the heroes of Moroccan literature and plays.
The unexpected frustration that society imposes on the sexual desires of its young men is allowed no outward expression. Aggression against the managers of the Moroccan economy is violently discouraged and legally repressed. Anger at society turns in towards the family and women – objects of frustrated desire.28 The family offers the sexually and politically oppressed Moroccan male a natural outlet for his frustrations.
A person who fears to express his aggression directly against the original social objects responsible for his frustration may express his aggression instead against some other objects. . . . The tendency to express aggression against irrelevant objects would increase with increasing anxiety about expressing aggression against the actual source of frustration.29
A man who is both economically and sexually oppressed by his society is likely to find it less traumatizing to express his rage and resentment against his family than against his boss. And society encourages him to do so. It encourages the male to believe that his honour depends primarily on maintaining an iron grip on his women and children. As Reich says, ‘sexual inhibition changes the structure of the economically oppressed in such a way that he acts, feels and thinks contrary to his own material interests.’30 The tragedy of the Moroccan youth who wants to love a woman is that his actions are likely to be directly opposite to his desires. Society’s conditioning – starting with his relationship with his mother31 and including pressure on him to be ‘a real man’ and his legal right to demand the subordination of his wife – is likely to produce reflexes that pertain more to hatred than love.
The traditional order, empowered by the codification of the shari’a in the modern family code, views men and women as antagonists and dooms the conjugal unit to conflict. By affirming the man’s right to have authority over women he can no longer control, given the breakdown of traditional spatial and economic structures, the modern Code places the man in a humiliating situation in which he perceives sexual desegregation and its effects as emasculating, given the difficulties he faces in fulfilling his traditional male role. For example, the rate of unemployment makes it difficult for the Moroccan male to perform the traditional duty of providing for his family. At the same time, allowing his wife to work outside, under the supervision of other males, makes him see himself, according to his traditional images of masculinity, as nothing more than a pimp (qawwad) or a cuckold (qarran).32
Male-female dynamics are influenced by two kinds of pressure:
1. The need, emerging from the process of desegregation, to value the heterosexual relationship and to expect love and sex in the conjugal unit.
2. The pressures from the prevailing traditional patterns, symbolized by parental authority and enhanced by modern family laws, to condemn the conjugal unit and debase sexual love.
The heterosexual relationship is caught between the poles of attraction and repulsion latent in traditional Muslim ideology. Modernization and economic necessity are breaking down the seclusion of women, which was the traditional Muslim solution to the conflict. Sexual desegregation creates new tensions and anxieties. Spatial boundaries and lines of authority between the sexes have become unclear, demanding completely new and often painful adjustments from both men and women. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties and tensions, despite the painful confrontations now being suffered by men and women in Morocco, a new phenomenon is now emerging: the conjugal couple made up of one man and one woman (‘without mamma’). It is now slowly gaining in legitimacy. The women I interviewed back in 1971 – regardless of social class, level of education, and activity – laid claim to the egalitarian couple, based on solidarity, as the foundation of a healthy family and a unique opportunity to raise generations of more fulfilled individuals, both emotionally and intellectually.
CONCLUSION
Women’s Liberation in Muslim Countries
People tend to perceive women’s liberation as a spiritual and not a material problem. We have seen this to be true in the case of Islam, where changes in conditions for women were perceived by Muslim male literature as involving solely religious problems. Muslims argued that changes in women’s conditions were a direct attack on Allah’s realm and order. But changes in the twentieth century, mainly in socialist societies, have showed that the liberation of women is predominantly an economic issue. Liberation is a costly affair for any society, and women’s liberation is primarily a question of the allocation of resources. A society that decides to liberate women not only has to provide them with jobs, but also has to take upon itself the responsibility for providing child care and food for all workers regardless of sex. A system of kindergartens and canteens is an indispensable investment promoting the liberation of women from traditional domestic chains.
The capacity to invest in women’s liberation is not a function of a society’s wealth, but of its goals and objectives. A society whose ultimate goal is profit rather than the development of human potential proves reluctant and finally unable to afford a state system of child-care centres and canteens. Mariarosa Della Costa explains how capitalism maintains, in the midst of its modern management of human resources and services, a pre-capitalist army of wageless workers – housewives – who provide unpaid child-care and domestic services.1 Hence the paradox: the ‘richest’ nation in the world (the nation that controls most of the world’s resources), the United States, is unable in spite of its much publicized abundance to afford a system of free kindergartens and canteens to promote women’s humanhood.
Have Arab societies taken a stand on the question? Until now, they have had no effective systematic and coherent programme. In the absence of such programmes, and because it is too soon to judge the emerging trends concerning the liberation of women in .independent Arab-Muslim states, I will limit myself to a few speculative remarks on the likely future of women in the Arab world. Before going any further, I want to draw attention to the inadequacy of the only two models for ‘women’s liberation’ presently available in the Arab-Muslim world.
The scarcity of effective models for ‘liberated women’ might explain the particularly strong reaction that ‘women’s liberation’ evokes from most Muslims. (By effective models I mean models which evoke images specific enough to stir people’s emotions.) One of these is an intrinsic Arab model, that of pre-Islamic family and sexuality patterns, the other is exogenous, the Western model. The socialist models of sexuality and family patterns are hardly known and enjoy a carefully cultivated indifference, based more often on ignoranc
e than on knowledgeable analysis. Both the pre-Islamic and Western models provoke traumatizing images of sexuality, although for different reasons.
Pre-Islamic sexuality is described in Arab literature as a chaotic, all-embracing, rampant promiscuity whose essence is women’s self-determination, freedom to choose and dimiss their sexual partner, or partners, and the utter unimportance of the biological father and paternal legitimacy. The idea of female sexual self-determination which is suggested by the term ‘women’s liberation’ is likely to stir ancestral fears of this mythical (pre-civilized) jahiliya woman before whom the male is deprived of all his initiative, control, and privilege. The way to win over a ‘liberated woman’ is to please her and make her love you, not to coerce and threaten her. But Muslim society does not socialize men to win women through love; they are badly equipped to deal with a self-determined woman; hence the repulsion and fear that accompany the idea of women’s liberation.
Confusing sexual self-determination of women with chaotic, lawless animalistic promiscuity is not exclusive to Muslim societies facing drastic changes in their family structure. This confusion existed and still exists in any society whose family system is based on the enslavement of the woman. Marx and Engels had to repeatedly attack the confusion of bourgeois writers which distorted their thinking about any family in which the woman was not reduced to an acquiescent slave.2 They had to show again and again that a non-bourgeois sexuality based on equality of the sexes does not necessarily lead to promiscuity, and that the bourgeois family pattern was an unjustified dehumanization of half of society. The same argument holds for Muslim societies. Muslim marriage is based on the premisses that social order can be maintained only if women’s dangerous potential for chaos is restrained by a dominating non-loving husband who has, besides his wife, other females (concubines, co-wives, and prostitutes) available for his sexual pleasure under equally degrading conditions.3 A new sexual order based on the absence of dehumanizing limitations of women’s potential means the destruction of the traditional Muslim family. In this respect, fears associated with changes in the family and the condition of women are justified. These fears, embedded in the culture through centuries of women’s oppression, are echoed and nourished by the vivid, equally degrading images of Western sexuality and its disintegrating family patterns portrayed on every imported television set.
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