Morocco is hailed by academics, international NGO workers, and the media as a trailblazer in women’s rights and legal reforms. The country is considered a model for other countries in the Middle East and North African region, but has Morocco made as much progress as experts and government officials claim? In Modernizing Patriarchy, Katja Žvan Elliott examines why women’s rights advances are lauded in Morocco in theory but are often not recognized in reality, despite the efforts of both Islamist and secular feminists. In Morocco, female literacy rates remain among the lowest in the region; many women are victims of gender-based violence despite legal reforms; and girls as young as twelve are still engaged to adult men, despite numerous reforms. Based on extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork in Oued al-Ouliya, Modernizing Patriarchy offers a window into the life of Moroccan Muslim women who, though often young and educated, find it difficult to lead a dignified life in a country where they are expected to have only one destiny: that of wife and mother. Žvan Elliott exposes their struggles with modernity and the legal reforms that are supposedly ameliorating their lives. In a balanced approach, she also presents male voices and their reasons for criticizing the prevailing women’s rights discourse. Compelling and insightful, Modernizing Patriarchy exposes the rarely talked about reality of Morocco’s approach toward reform.

Extrait de la préface : "The subject of this study is social change in the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan ; its impact on women's legal status and social positions ; and women's varied responses to, and involvment in, change processes. It also deals with constructions of gender during periods of social and political change. Social change is usually described in terms of modernization, revolution, cultural challenges, and social movements. Much of the standard literature on these topics does not examine women or gender, and thus [the author] hopes this study will contribute to an appreciation of the significance of gender in the midst of change. Neither are there many sociological studies on MENA and Afghansitan or studies on women in MENA and Afghanistan from a sociological perspective. Myths and stereotypes abund regarding women, Islam, and the region, and the sevents of September 11 and since have only compounded them. This book is intended in part to "normalize" the Middle East by underscoring the salience of structural determinants other than religion. It focuses on the major social-change processes in the region to show how women's lives are shaped not only by "Islam" and "culture", but also by economic development, the state, class location, and the world system. Why the focus on women? It is [the autor's] contention that middle-class women are consciously and unconsciously major agents of social change in the region, at the vanguard of movements for modernity, democratization and citizenship."

The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, Stephanie Smith examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and rel

This collection examines the mutually influential interactions of gender and the state in Latin America from the late colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Locating watershed moments in the processes of gender construction by the organized power of the ruling classes and in the processes by which gender has conditioned state-making, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America remedies the lack of such considerations in previous studies of state formation. Along these lines, the book begins with two theoretical chapters by the editors, Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux. Dore opens by arguing against the prevailing view that the nineteenth century was marked by a gradual emancipation of women, while Molyneux considers how various Latin American state forms—liberal, corporatist, socialist, neoliberal—have more recently sought to incorporate women into their projects of social reform and modernization. These essays are followed by twelve case studies that examine how states have contributed to the normalization of male and female roles and relations. Covering an impressive breadth not only of historical time but also of geographical scope, this volume moves from Brazil to Costa Rica, from Mexico to Chile, traversing many countries in between. Contributors explore such topics as civic ritual in Bolivia, rape in war-torn Colombia, and the legal construction of patriarchy in Argentina. They examine the public regulation of domestic life, feminist lobby groups, class compromise, female slaves, and women in rural households—distinct, salient aspects of the state-gender relationship in specific countries at specific historical junctures. By providing a richly descriptive and theoretically grounded account of the interaction between state and gender politics in Latin America, this volume contributes to an important conversation between feminists interested in the state and political scientists interested in gender. It will be valuable to such disciplines as history, sociology, international comparative studies, and Latin American studies. Contributors. María Eugenia Chaves, Elizabeth Dore, Rebecca Earle, Jo Fisher, Laura Gotkowitz, Donna J. Guy, Fiona Macaulay, Maxine Molyneux, Eugenia Rodriguez, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Ann Varley, Mary Kay Vaughan

Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt investigates the use of medicine as a 'tool of empire' to serve the state building process in Egypt by the British colonial administration. It argues that the colonial state effectively transformed Egyptian medical practice and medical knowledge in ways that were decidedly gendered. On the one hand, women medical professionals who had once trained as 'doctresses' (hakimas) were now restricted in their medical training and therefore saw their social status decline despite colonial modernity's promise of progress. On the other hand, the introduction of colonial medicine gendered Egyptian medicine in ways that privileged men and masculinity. Far from being totalized colonial subjects, Egyptian doctors paradoxically reappropriated aspects of Victorian science to forge an anticolonial nationalist discourse premised on the Egyptian woman as mother of the nation. By relegating Egyptian women - whether as midwives or housewives - to maternal roles in the home, colonial medicine was determinative in diminishing what control women formerly exercised over their profession, homes and bodies through its medical dictates to care for others. By interrogating how colonial medicine was constituted, Hibba Abugideiri reveals how the rise of the modern state configured the social formation of native elites in ways directly tied to the formation of modern gender identities, and gender inequalities, in colonial Egypt.

Spanning cultures across the 20th century, this volume explores how marriage, especially in the West, was disestablished as the primary institution organizing social life. In the developing world, the economic, social, and legal foundations of traditional marriage are stronger but also weakening. Marriage changed because an industrial wage economy reduced familial patriarchal control of youth and women and spurred demands and possibilities for greater autonomy and choice in love. After the Second World War, when more married women pursued education and employment, and gays and lesbians gained visibility, feminism and gay liberation also challenged patriarchal and restrictive gender roles and helped to reshape marriage. In 1920 most people married for life; in the twenty-first century fewer marry, and serial monogamy prevails. Marriage is more diverse and flexible in form but also more fragile and optional than it once was. Over the century control of courtship shifted from parents to youth, and friends, as opposed to kin, became more important in sustaining marriages. Dual-wage-earner families replaced the male breadwinner. Social and political liberalism assailed conservative laws and religious regimes, expanding access to divorce and birth control. Although norms of masculinity and femininity retain huge power in most cultures, visions of more egalitarian and romantic love as the basis of marriage have gained traction-made appealing by the global spread of capitalist social relations and also broadcast by culture industries in the developed world. The legalization of same-sex marriage-in over twenty-five nations by 2020-epitomizes a century of change toward a less gender-defined ideal that includes a continued desire for social recognition and permanence. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

In 1910, when Khedive Abbas II married a second wife surreptitiously, the contrast with his openly polygamous grandfather, Ismail, whose multiple wives and concubines signified his grandeur and masculinity, could not have been greater. That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypt’s modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt. Family is central to modern Egyptian history and in the ruling court did the “political work.” Indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the ruler’s household served in the military and civil service. Cuno discusses political and sociodemographic changes that affected marriage and family life and the production of a family ideology by modernist intellectuals, who identified the family as a site crucial to social improvement, and for whom the reform and codification of Muslim family law was a principal aim. Throughout Modernizing Marriage, Cuno examines Egyptian family history in a comparative and transnational context, addressing issues of colonial modernity and colonial knowledge, Islamic law and legal reform, social history, and the history of women and gender.