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Women Income Agency

Lower Income Women's Experiences in Damascus

Abstract

Drawing on theories of structure and agency, this article assesses how women in lower income households in Damascus use existing gender schemas to avoid unattractive employment and improve their access to income and employment. It highlights the overlapping effects of economic policy and gender dependency schemas on both the need for additional income and women's employment opportunities.

While providing greater access to resources, women's accommodation to gender dependency schemas also helps to maintain domesticity and dependence on men. Agency for these women draws on and reinforces a collectively gendered sense of self that is central to the process of both obtaining resources and doing gender.

Introduction

Over the past decade, a growing body of research has done much to dismiss stereotypes regarding women in the Middle East. Moving away from narratives emphasizing either women's oppression within the AMuslim world, or the strength of women's kinship networks, scholars have begun to examine the nuances of resistance and compliance (Abu-Lughod 1993 and 2000; MacLeod 1991 and 1992), as well as the effects of political struggle (Lazreg 1994; Mahmood 2005) and economic circumstances (Moghadam 2003; Ozyegin 2001; Singerman 1995) on normative gender ideals and their implications for women's well being and access to resources.

This article extends and refines this research in two ways. First, building on MacLeod's (1991 and 1992) discussion of veiling as an example of Aaccommodating protest, I explore the uses and constraints of gender dependency schemas with regard to women's employment decisions. Second, drawing on Sewell's (1992) theorizing on structure and agency I argue that women's employment decisions in Damascus illustrate the process through which gender emerges at the intersection of personal agency, collective identity and access to resources.

My primary concern is to offer an approach to theorizing gender that places structure (both resources and normative schemas about identity and what is good) at the center, without marginalizing either the negotiation of gender in interpersonal interaction or the exercise of agency in everyday life.

Theorizing Agency, Resources and Moral Schemas

MacLeod (1991 and 1992) opens a way for this discussion through her exploration of the nuances of agency and compliance in the practice of veiling among new lower-middle class bureaucratic workers in Cairo. She argues that theories explaining compliance often lead to a accommodation / victimization dichotomy in which agency is lost. Instead she interprets the Anew veiling in Cairo as an example of Aaccommodating protest that reaffirms women's domesticity while also allowing them to earn much needed income working outside the household.

Although this strategy may be interpreted as Atrading power for patronage in the reproduction of social inequality (Schwalbe, Godwin, Holden, Schrock, Thompson, and Wolkomir 2000), MacLeod argues that veiling is not only a symbolic accommodation to norms of domesticity, but also a protest against the loss of economic security and resources within families.

Her analysis does not make as explicit the processes through which normative ideals around women's identity and embeddedness in families intersect with state policies that shape both the distribution of resources and women's decisions to work outside the home. The processes that connect social structure, agency and schemas of dependency, in other words, remain to be more fully explored.

One conceptual tool that allows us to begin to untangle this knot can be found in Sewell's (1992) theorizing on structure and agency. Building on the work of Giddens (1979) and Bourdieu (1977), Sewell argues that social structures are sets of schemas which he defines as generalizable sets of more-or-less formal rules and normative orientations and meanings that guide action, and resources (both material and personal). Schemas work as moral or normative maps (what Smith (2003) calls Amoral orders) and are both embodied in institutions and enacted by individuals.

While schemas tend to be reproduced through human action, they also embody possibilities for their own transformation particularly as they are creatively applied or Atransposed to new contexts or situations. The varying ability of individuals to reinterpret and mobilize resources, coupled with the unpredictability of outcomes when schemas are applied to new situations allows for stability in patterns of relationships and power as well as the possibility for change.

Conceptually, this points to the salience of a middle level range of beliefs about both how the world should work and how one should rightly behave within it. More than discrete rules or cultural tools, thinking about schemas as part of the broad moral orders (Smith 2003) that shape women's lives allows me to specify how what I call Agender dependency schemas are experienced as a complex of multiple, layered and sometimes contradictory sets of values, ideals and beliefs about work, gender, and family.

Agency and Identity in the Middle East

Complicating the use of schemas as a framework for understanding gender within families in Syria is a collective sense of identity that embeds individuals within patriarchal kin networks and frames employment, marriage, and family relations. The centrality of patriarchal kinship to marriage, family and employment has a long history in Syria (Meriwether 1999). For contemporary women throughout the Middle East, these relations continue to be foundational to their sense of identity and agency.

Suad Joseph (1994), for example, argues that families in Lebanon are characterized by a collective identity that emerges out of Arelational rights within patriarchal families, rather than out of a contractual self, based on notions of individual autonomy. Rather than theorizing a connected relational self enmeshed in a web of family relationships as dysfunctional, Joseph (1999) proposes a more culturally nuanced notion of self, one that is embedded in relations with kin within a broader context of Apatriarchal connectivity. Invoking the image of an old cedar, she argues that envisioning Arab identity as embedded and relational captures both a sense of security and ability to draw strength from one's roots, as well the intransigence many women's experience.

The roots of identity are generated and maintained through the father, whose Aseed transmits and unites individuals within households and across extended families (Delaney 1991). Just as God generates the world, so too men (specifically older, married men) are understood as generating and having authority over family members. That authority is expressed through men extending or denying permission to marry, engage in business, manage property, travel, or even speak in public.

Moreover, it is reinforced through networks of related men who act as surrogates by enforcing standards of behavior and movement expected within the household. Whereas the authority of sons gradually increases as they enter adulthood, daughters and wives remain under the authority of an older man throughout their lives.

Still, women find subtle ways to manouevre around paternal permission by obscuring, redefining or redirecting their movements and activities in ways that maintain at least semblances of deference and obedience, while resisting and setting limits to their subordination (Abu Lughod 1990; MacLeod 1992).

Gender Dependency Schemas, Agency and Collective Identity

In the same way that authority to act lies formally outside the self (Delaney 1991) and operates across a diffused set of kin, agency and identity are also diffused across groups of related kin. This collective and relational self (Joseph 1991) is also a collectively gendered self whose identity is framed by a moral vision of responsible and respectable womanhood that encompasses patriarchal kinship, deference, honor, protection and provision.

Women's position is clearly subordinate. However, circumscribed power does not negate agency at least as agency as understood as formed and given meaning within a particular set of relationships (see Mahmood (2005) on agency, morality and the self within the context of Islamic cultural politics).

Gender dependency schemas provide a moral narrative framework at the intersections of patriarchal permission, collective identity and the ability of women to exercise agency within the constraints of their personal and material resources. These are framed by social class, as well as the moral orders and resources embodied in state economic and social policies. Conceptually, this notion of gender dependency schemas adds depth and nuance to theoretical models of the negotiation of gender.

Trenchant and popular models of gender as managed and negotiated (Gerson and Peiss 1985; West and Zimmerman 1987), or the notion of bargaining with patriarchy in which women receive Aprotection and security in exchange for submissiveness and propriety (Kandiyoti 1988, 280) draw on language that suggests human action can best be described using economic metaphors and rational choice.

What Sewell's concept of schemas and Smiths discussion of moral orders add to this theorizing is a basis for assessing why particular ends are understood as meaningful or good and why particular strategies for moving towards those ends are understood as right, normative, fair or just. These in turn intersect with state schemas around identity, women's rights, the distribution of resources and social class.

State Schemas, Resources & Women's Employment

During the twentieth century, especially following the rise to power of the late President Hafez al-Assad in 1963 and continuing after the passing of power to his son Bashar in 2000, multiple political and economic forces have reshaped the class structure of Syria. Since the mid-1990s, declining oil rents and reductions in funding from the former Soviet Union and the Gulf States, along with regional political tensions and high military spending, have all contributed to a growing sense of economic and political precariousness (Hinnebush 1996; Poelling 1996).

Wages are low for the majority of workers in Damascus. Even professionals who by Western standards might be expected to command relatively high salaries typically earn less than three hundred dollars per month. As a result, it is now common for even professional men to hold two jobs, one in government (which employs approximately 40 percent of the workforce (Central Bureau of Statistics2003)) and a second in the small, but growing, private sector.

For multiple reasons, women's employment is becoming increasingly acceptable in Syria as in other countries in the region (Assaad and el-Hamidi 2001; Hoodfar 1997; Moghadam 2003; Sonbol 2003). Three decades of Ba'ath socialist party policies encouraging women's education and public discourse supporting women's contribution to society at all levels have provided an alternative normative framework for understanding employment as liberating rather than a last resort that reflects the failure of husbands or other male kin to provide.

In addition to free university training for those with qualifying exam scores, a range of state sponsored vocational schools provide courses in computers, education, cross-stitch, sewing, foreign language and other fields. Literacy for both boys and girls dramatically improved under Assad and women receive equal pay as men in similar positions within the bureaucracy.

Although women comprise only one-seventh of the total work force, educated middle class women are fairly well represented within the professions, particularly education, and government service . Women hold 27 percent of all positions in state ministries, and 14 of 154 seats in the People's Assembly (Central Bureau of Statistics 2003; Shaaban 1996) roughly the same percentage of women as are in the United States Congress.

Lower income households find themselves in a rather different position vis-a-vis these resources. Most have relatively low levels of education and struggle to obtain adequate employment. Wages are equivalent to approximately 80 dollars a month and the poorest of the poor live hand-to-mouth. Government subsidies for basic foods and utilities allow families to stretch their income to cover most necessities.

Yet economic restructuring has led to the reduction or elimination of many of these subsidies, as well as fewer opportunities for employment in state sponsored construction, industry or manufacturing. Resulting inflation and underemployment strain lower income families, so that even when men hold a second or third job there is generally not enough to make ends meet.

For women in lower income households, finding suitable employment is much more problematic than it is for their middle and upper class counterparts. In spite of Ba'ath party efforts to foster women's education and public service, lower income families tend to be more conservative regarding appropriate activities for women outside the household.

Given the need for additional income, however, families are increasingly faced with the problem of reconciling their material needs with normative ideals regarding women's domesticity and men's economic responsibilities. For these families, employment in the Ainformal sector as workers in small family businesses, piece workers, self-employed and small production are common alternatives to formal paid labor (Early 1993; Lobban 1998), especially for women with lower levels of education (Ali 1998; Assaad and El-Hamidi 2001).

The Research

This article addresses two sets of related questions. First, how does the application of existing gender schemas to increasing demands for income modify or reinforce existing patterns of women's subordination and dependence on men? Behind these material and social essentials lie beliefs about what is essential to life, among which is a gendered sense of self that is negotiated within a particular ideological and political-economic system.

A second set of questions assesses how the political economy of Syria forms and limits the parameters within which lower income women negotiate gender and employment. The intent is to examine gender as a structure of practice as it is lived at the intersections of agency, resources, and identity.

Fieldwork

The basis of my analysis is fieldnotes made following multiple open-ended discussions with women in Damascus, Syria. These conversations took place during eight, one-to-four month periods of fieldwork conducted between 1992 and 2004. While the broader project involved discussions with women across class, this analysis focuses on lower income women employed two informal craft projects.

These projects are two of several sponsored by various local, national and international organizations in an effort to alleviate poverty through the coordination, manufacture and marketing of handcrafts. Recognizing that women tend to use their income for basic household needs and as a buffer in unstable or abusive relationships, both projects focused their efforts on training and employment that provided women opportunities for earning and controlling their own income.

This fieldwork coincided with the initiation of one project in 1992, and followed women working in a second project established in 1982. Fifteen women were active in the newer, decentralized project that began in 1992. Ten of the fifteen women were Palestinians whose families had lived in Syria for three or four generations.

Nine of the fifteen were unmarried young women in their late teens or early twenties helping to support their parents ' household during the in-between years following highschool and before marriage. The project also employed five married women and one widow in their mid to late 40s who were supplementing their own household income by producing cross-stitch. In this decentralized project, all of the women did their sewing at home, with the director dropping off materials and picking up finished work once every week or so.

The second, more established project was much larger. More than two hundred women were associated with that project, most scattered throughout the community and in towns to the south. About a fifth of these women are Palestinian. The large majority do cross-stitch at home and come to the workshop to pick up materials and drop off finished work as need and opportunity arise. Most of my contact with women in this more established project was limited to the eight to ten women who worked in a workshop owned by the director.

One or two these women were Palestinian, the remainder were Syrian nationals. During my visiting, nearly all of the women working in the shop were unmarried. Women affiliated with the project who worked within their households came from a wide range of family situations some married, some never-married and living at home, some widowed, separated or divorced. In extended households, senior women were more likely to be doing cross-stitch; while daughters-in-law and younger married women were generally too occupied with caring for small children to take on additional work.

The fathers and husbands in these families worked in a variety of occupations: shopkeeper or a baker, driving a taxi, or low-level government service. Others were retired, disabled, or, in a few cases, absent. Salaries for employed men ranged from forty to seventy dollars a month.

Visiting & Fieldnotes

The field work for this analysis consisted primarily of multiple informal visits with women involved in these two craft projects. Visits took place in women's homes or in the workshop where I had opportunity to talk with both women who worked in the shop as well as those who dropped in to pick up or deliver materials. 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 multiple visits that typically each lasted several hours.

In all cases, I was introduced as a visiting professor who wanted to learn more about how women managed work and family life, and as a friend of the director with whom women could talk freely without concern that information would be passed on to the security police. My son (age three when I began the research) came along on numerous visits, allowing conversations to naturally flow towards the difficulties women face in combining paid work with family life. Visits involved not only discussion of work and family issues, but drinking tea, socializing and helping to prepare or share in an occasional meal.

Conversations were in both English and Arabic. At times, the project directors assisted in translation filling in the gaps in my vocabulary when the conversation ranged beyond the topics of work and family with which I was most familiar. Other times I visited with a university student whom I introduced as a friend who would help translate when necessary. Copious field notes were made as soon as possible after each visit describing the places, people present, behaviors, a general outline of how the discussion progressed, stories told, and as much as possible reconstructions of specific sections of the conversation.

On occasion, I would sit down with the student who accompanied me and we would tape record an oral Areview of what we'd done that morning, together reconstructing the conversation, interaction, and setting of that morning's visit. Although fieldwork often involves taping and transcribing interviews, this was neither possible nor desirable among these families. Taping conversations would have significantly altered the dynamics of an informal visit.

Moreover, given concerns with control over information and confidentiality the women with whom I visited would have rightly been hesitant to speak had I produced a tape recorder at the onset of our conversations. Thus, as in the case of numerous others doing field work among women in this region (Early 1993; Hoodfar1997; MacLeod 1991;White 1994) this analysis draws on observation and reconstructed conversations rather than direct quotations from transcribed tape-recorded interviews.

Multiple visits with women, both in the workshop and in their own homes, produced literally hundreds of pages of field notes. The comments of women below were selected as representative of the perspectives and themes that emerged from a systematic reading, coding and re-reading of those notes.

Drawing on a small sample, of course, makes it difficult to generalize, so that women's descriptions of whether, when and why they engage in income generating labor clearly are not intended to be interpreted as representative of the voices of women in Syria, or women in Damascus, let alone AMuslim or AArab women overall. Quotations are not intended to be representative but rather illustrative of a range of strategies women employ in applying gender dependency schemas to the practical need to augment a household's income.

Gender Dependency Schemas, Resources & Employment

Women discussed a number of factors that affected their evaluation and decisions regarding wage work. The first and most salient of these were normative ideals regarding responsible womanhood. As in MacLeod's study of women in Cairo, the women with whom I visited were nearly all members of fairly conservative Sunni Muslim households. (Seventy-five percent of the population of Syria are Sunni Muslims, twelve percent are Alawite, nine percent are Christian, and approximately three percent are Druze.

Only two women in the study were from a Christian background.) For these Muslim women, ideals regarding modesty, privacy, and respectful womanhood posed serious constraints on the types of employment that could be considered, particularly employment in which women might have to interact with non-related men. In our early discussions, women were unanimous in providing as their initial reason for choosing to work with these crafts projects, that Ait is forbidden for us to work outside the home.

While later conversations added layers of nuance to the notion that paid work was Aforbidden, it is worthwhile to consider the idea itself, since it reflects what Peteet (1991) has called the Apresentation of culture- an idealized, simplified version of normative ideals intended to establish a social relationship with someone from the Aoutside. As in any introduction, the presentation of culture is a distilled, streamlined version of practices and values that are generally much more layered and nuanced than they first appear.

What emerged during discussions of the Arule about being forbidden to work were a broader set of values related to gender dependency schemas and women's embeddedness in networks of kin. Drawing on Sewell's theorizing structure as schemas and resources, Awe are forbidden summarizes women's structural location - a fluid intersection of gender dependency schemas and limited access to resources represented by advanced education, training or networks.

Women's real experiences were that not all types of employment were forbidden and some types of employment were more forbidden than others - highlighting the flexible and transposable nature of gender schemas themselves. Moreover, the notion of outside employment as forbidden begs the question, "forbidden by whom?" It points to the structural position of women vis-a-vis male relatives, and highlights the salience of human resources and the gendered access to those resources that enable men to effectively enforce normative gender schemas, as well as outline the contours of women's agency and identity.

Male Power & Women's Employment

The importance of male power in women's employment decisions became apparent as women discussed their attitudes towards employment and their experiences with husbands, fathers, brothers or sons who restricted their activities outside the home. The constraining influence of related men was something women described as collaborative - men acted cooperatively to limit women's outside activities.

Consistent with the broader normative value placed on the collective rather than the individual, women's experience of collaborative male power suggests that gender schemas and gendered experience, in this context, are collective as well. One unmarried woman in her early 20s described her situation this way:

It is forbidden for us. Our brother won't even allow us to go out alone. He tells us not to look here and there, to watch our eyes and not to look to the right or left. He won't allow us to go on any journey, or he wants to go with us because he says, "you need a man beside you." We can't even breathe if he doesn't allow us to breathe. ... He'll say, "don't go out of this house!" and what can we do? We can't go against his will.

Why this woman and her sister can't go outside against his will is that he threatens physical violence. The threat, as a means of controlling women's behavior, both strengthens and reinforces norms of female propriety. Nor are these threats always empty. More than one woman described physical violence as a serious constraining factor in her life. Both married and unmarried women spoke the constraining effect of threats by male relatives - husbands and brothers who threatened divorce, disowning, abandonment, or used verbal or physical abuse to increase women's compliance.

In the case of the woman quoted above, her father made it clear that he believed that interacting with non-related men was shameful. He had passed the enforcement of this restriction to his eldest son, whom he allowed to govern his sisters. The fact that the son took this responsibility seriously was physically evident in the face of one sister who was nursing a bruised cheek bone the day we met.

Collaborative male power was also evidenced among fathers who used other male family members as allies in controlling women's behavior. Most employed men work outside the home for the large part of the day- usually returning in the early evening to work a second shift at the same or another job. Some work outside the country and may be absent for extended periods of time.

During their absence, husbands may indirectly control their wives' behavior by relying on reports provided by an uncle, father, brother or son. One woman in a particularly difficult situation described the collaboration between her husband and nine year old son that prevented her from working for pay even inside the home:

My husband doesn't want me to work because he says what he makes is enough for us. He earns about 6000 pounds a month (approximately one hundred and twenty dollars) driving a service (a taxi with a regular route). He is living in Lebanon and comes home ten days a month. He needs a lot of money to spend; everything there is so expensive. He doesn't give me the money all at once. Every ten days, he may send a thousand, and after ten days, a thousand; and after quarreling, a thousand.

I told him I could work inside the house by translating something for the French newspaper or something like that. But he said no. I tried doing it, but my son told him, "Father, my mother is working inside the house by translating for the newspaper." And he said, "No, you can't. I give you enough money and you have to survive on that." He pays my son to tell him what I do, so I cannot do anything.

The issue within this household was not that the husband was away, as much as that the type of job the woman wanted to do involved her going out to the office of the publisher and interacting with non-family men. Although the state had provided extensive training in French language and literature at school, gender dependency schemas within the household, in combination with her husband's absences, trumped this resource undermining her ability to put that education to use.

This particular woman was especially vulnerable because her father had died and the rest of her family refused to help her because they had disapproved of her marriage. In this way, a breakdown in collective support resulted from her failure to comply with schemas around choice of a marriage partner put her at additional risk of abuse of male power.

I married when I was 14 years old. My family did not want me to marry this man. Only my father supported me. After he died, I had no one. When I quarreled with my husband and went to my family and told them that I wanted to leave, my brother hit me and said, "You have to go back." They obliged me to go back to him, and when he saw this he became proud of himself and thought, "okay, now she has no place to go and I can do what I want with her." He always hits me. He says, "You are like my shoe. When I want to take you off, I will take you off. When I want to put you on, I will put you on. You are nothing. You are my servant." What can I do?

Not all women are quite so vulnerable. For women who have little education or independent sources of income, maintaining allies among male relatives is essential to their well-being. Indeed, for most women, collaborative male power is a salient and valuable resource on which they can depend.

Brothers, fathers, uncles and sons act together as protectors and providers - giving money, labor, and advice. In the presence of such allies women may be protected, even from an abusive spouse. As one married woman, doing cross-stitch at home explained.

When I was first married, my husband used to get very angry at me for any little thing. He beat me so often I couldn't bear it. So I went to my parents house. My father wanted to send me home. He said, Ayou have to obey your husband. But my brothers told him no, he should respect me as a human being. How would it look if they allowed my husband to do this? And they went and spoke to him and told him he should respect me; I am their sister. After that, he treated me better.

Power as it affects these women resides not just in individual men, but in associated groups of men who have a collective interest in the lives of the women to whom they are related. Bringing the influence of brothers to bear on both fathers and husbands, and leveraging the collective power of men who are invested in preserving their family's reputation and extending its resources exemplify how women are able to draw on gender dependency schemas to mobilize the resources of kin to improve relationships with husbands at home.

Taken alone, collaborative male power might be interpreted as evidence that women are victims of an entrenched and oppressive patriarchy. Yet while it is true that women with few resources are particularly vulnerable to the abuses of male power, too great an emphasis on vulnerability obscures how some women are able to mobilize gender dependency schemas to increase access to resources through networks of male kin.

Women also act as resources for each other in ways that provide access to employment and increase control over wages. Mothers advocate for daughters who are interested in doing cross-stitch, re-framing and occasionally obscuring the real value of the work by reminding fathers that it is Ajust hand crafts and Ashe needs to fill her time before marriage or Athe girls all go together to the shop, no one will bother them on the micro-bus. Moreover, mothers and daughters collude with each other in providing alternative explanations for where they are going and what they are doing.

We cannot each go to the shop and so we tell our father that we are going to my cousin's. Then we meet and go to the workshop together [Q: Does your mother know that you are working in the shop?] Yes. She says it is a good thing for us to earn some money before marriage.

She says we will have something in case he is not good to us. So if our father asks, she says we went to visit our cousin. And we did! So it is okay. Because we are paid at the workshop our father doesn't know. And our mother holds the money for us so we don't spend it on ice cream (laughs).

Through re-framing activities, obscuring the extent of involvement, handing over a portion of their wages and hiding the rest, or providing alternative explanations or justifications for their activities, women act as resources for each other in circumventing collaborative male power.

Agency, Resources & Gender Dependency Schemas

Gender dependency schemas can themselves be modified in the light of greater access to resources. One of those resources is education. Education is widely available through state policies mandating free public schooling through ninth grade and post-secondary education to those who academically qualify.

For women and girls, having additional skills (whether reading, computer literacy or sewing) can translate into a re-thinking and modification of the Arule that women should not work outside the household. Gender dependency schemas, in other words, may be modified in light of a good enough reason - some other resource - that makes women's wage earning reasonable.

Within the same family, for example, one daughter may be forbidden to work outside the home on the grounds that to do so would be considered shameful, while another daughter is expected to work outside the home because her educational background allows her to take a job which has higher status or is more respectable. The effects of resources such as an education are also connected to ideals regarding what is an acceptable job.

Defining acceptable employment

Among the considerations women mentioned in describing attitudes towards employment were the work itself, the degree to which a particular job violated norms regarding women's interaction with non-family men, and the degree to which employment interfered with women's obligations in the home. A common comparison women made in describing acceptable and unacceptable employment was the contrast between factory labor and participation in the cross-stitch employment projects with which they were working.

Factory labor: Some of the women who were doing cross-stitch said that their most likely alternative would be to work in a local sewing shop. Yet for many women, the structure of the work - its boundedness and inflexibility - made factory labor unattractive.

Married women working for the crafts projects were unanimous in saying they preferred sewing at home because they were able to take care of other responsibilities, whether children, cleaning, meal preparation, or hospitality. The account of one middle aged woman whose family owned a small shop in their building was typical of many married women who considered factory labor incompatible with family responsibilities.

I worked at a shirt factory before I got married. They wanted me to come at least for half a day, but after I was married I couldn't do the housework and be away that long. It is a lot of work ... I have to do the floors every day because of the dust, and there is not always electricity or water.

Also, I am responsible to make tea for anyone who comes by the shop to do business with my husband, so he is against me working outside. He approves of my doing sewing for the project, because this work doesn't require me to go out. This is much easier for me, as well.

The degree to which a job is a good job has a lot to do with the degree to which it interferes with women's domestic responsibilities. The inherent flexibility of the production of handcrafts at home, the organization and characteristics of the work, allow women to participate in wage labor, without that labor interfering with what they, and their relatives, consider their primary responsibilities inside the household. Choosing labor that complements women's domesticity, however, also reinforces gender dependency schemas regarding the relationships of women and men in families.

For other women, particularly those who are unmarried, avoiding the social stigma attached to factory work is especially important. Traveling long distances to work, either walking or on public transportation, exposes unmarried women to a wide range of non-family men, jeopardizing their marriageability.

While this may not be a problem in the short term, brothers and fathers intervene to prohibit outside employment as girls grow older and the need to find an appropriate husband becomes more urgent. In these cases, unlike the case of MacLeod's lower level bureaucracy workers, wearing the hijab or headscarf is not always enough to insure the family's reputation. Only remaining at home will do. One woman put on the hijab in order to quell her brother's objection that riding public transportation with the same group of young men every day would ruin her chances for a decent marriage.

Because her father was deceased, her brother had begun to take responsibility for making sure she behaved in a way that both honored the family in general and preserved their ability to locate suitable husband for her. He argued that putting on the hijab was not enough; she was still riding with the same young men and rumors were beginning to circulate. She explained that his complaining and threatening were like a dripping tap - eventually they wore her out and she quit her job at the workshop. Now she does cross-stitch from home and visits the girls in the workshop when she drops off completed work.

Another young woman explained that her cousin wanted her to work in his factory, but that her father said, "no". The father, who was sitting on the floor in the doorway during this particular visit, was quick to explain his reasons for refusing:

There are too many strange men. We don't know them. Even though it is her cousin's shop, there are strange men coming and going. It is not right. What if one of them wants to marry her? He may treat her badly after they are married, saying, "Oh, you're just a factory girl!". That isn't right.

These two examples illustrate the immediate and enduring stigma attached to factory labor that affects the entire family. On the one hand, factory labor represents a public display of need and identifies the entire family as poor (Rugh 1985; White 1994). In this way, it differs from middle class occupations in which, as in MacLeod's analysis, women are less clearly working because they are poor and are able to maintain a sense of deserving public respect by wearing the hijab.

This is particularly hard on husbands, fathers and brothers whose identity is tied up in their ability to provide for the household and the need to locate suitable husbands for unmarried girls. On the other hand, factory labor also carries a long-term stigma that may be used against girls after marriage. A woman is "just a factory girl" and by implication, not worth much.

In the case more middle-income households, however, the stigma of paid work may be neutralized by the idea that a woman is putting her education to good use rather than working out of necessity. Gender dependency schemas, in other words, may be modified in light of greater resources - whether kin support, education or higher income.

Handcrafts: While there were a number of reasons women cited for not wanting to work in the local factories, they spoke positively about the benefits of participating in these particular handcrafts projects. Unlike other income generating projects, this work appeared to be less exploitive and did not directly compete with women's other domestic work (Lyon 1991; Mies, Bennholdt-Thompsen and von Werlhof 1988; White 1994). As one middle aged, married woman explained:

I like doing this work. I don't have to go out. I used to work for another handcrafts project. But I had to go get the material myself and I prefer not to go out. The supervisor brings whatever I need - thread, material, canvas - to my house. ... I also like this work because I can do it whenever I want and for however long I want. And it doesn't interfere with my other responsibilities.

Because of restrictions on women's interacting with non-related men, the degree to which paid labor requires women to go outside the home is an important consideration in how they evaluate employment. In the case of doing needlework at home, women are able to produce handcrafts for the market, while remaining ostensibly outside of the market. In doing so, they are able to supplement their household income, without exposing themselves, or their need for additional income to the public eye.

Women's Wages, Agency & the Uses of Dependency Gender Schemas

Because women embrace the notion that their primary responsibilities are domestic, when they produce handcrafts, they consider themselves to be not really working. As in other national contexts where women do craft work to generate income (Butler 1998; Early 1993; White 1994), the women with whom I visited consistently down-played the significance of their labor, describing it not as "work" but as "just handcrafts." In doing so, they reinforced the gender dependency schemas that they should not and do not, technically at least, work for a wage.

Perhaps more importantly, by defining this work as not work, women were also able to maintain a modicum of control over the money that they earned. They described how they would tell their husbands they weren't really working because it was just cross-stitch and didn't bring in much money. Husbands, they said, were more likely to say never mind, it isn't really (substantial) money and acquiesce.

While there is a long history of separate monies for women and men in this area of the Middle East, the practice of women having control over their own earnings is not always followed in practice, particularly among the poor (for detailed analyses of women's experiences with property rights, see Esposito 2002; Mores 1995; Sonbol 2003). The Qur'an declares that husbands and not wives are responsible for providing for the household.

However, it is not unusual for a husband to demand that his wife sell some of her jewelry or give her some of her personal money, in order for him to travel, invest in a small business, or pay a debt. In cases where husbands have little income of their own, wives were likely to be more pressed to give at least some of their wages. In these circumstances especially, both symbolic and practical characteristics of the work (as Ajust cross-stitch not Areal work) helped women redefine and obscure their income.

Moreover, because husbands are typically not at home when women receive payment and because work done for pay cannot easily be distinguished from work done as a gift for a relative, women talked about being able to both hide their income or satisfy husbands with giving only a token. To the extent, then, that these women are able to define their work is not real work, their wage is not a real wage and is protected to a greater degree from claims by their husbands. At the same time, by defining their work as not-work, women continue to act within dependency gender schemas and avoid offending husbands, who are ostensibly responsible for providing for the family.

Importantly, this "non-work" work generally increased a family's income by thirty to forty percent. It provided a buffer not only against poverty, but against divorce or other family crisis. Married women talked about spending their earnings on their children and hiding some of it away just in case a husband deserted, was unable to work, or took another wife.

Unmarried women spent their earnings on themselves B buying clothing or jewelry or paying for classes in sewing or computers that would increase their ability to attract both a better husband or a better job. In each of these cases, whether directly or indirectly, these expenditures benefitted families in ways that women generally control.

Discussion

Conceptualizing schemas a constellation of ideals or as moral narratives around gender, held by and embodied in groups, and agency as emerging within the context of relationships is particularly helpful for understanding more collectively organized households in the Middle East. In contrast to cultures heavily influenced by rational individualism, ideas about what is good employment in the Middle East are not primarily a matter of personal preference or choice.

Good jobs and the gendered rules that guide their assessment are collectively identified, assessed and pursued. This is not to say that women do not negotiate. They do; they bargain, negotiate, and actively manage their gendered identity and relationships. My effort here is to move the conceptualizing of gender as process to a prior question; that is: what are the normative ideals or moral narratives around a more collectively based identity, gender, and family that inform women's choices around employment. Doing so extends Sewell's theorizing of agency and structure by specifying the process through which social position (gender, class, education, etc.) situates women vis a vis cultural schemas and different access to resources.

It specifies the centrality of social position and of power in relation to gender, class and education to structure and form the limits of human agency. Moreover it highlights the centrality of deeply held moral frameworks about what is good and right for women and their families in the process of obtaining and managing resources.

Theorizing the process of applying gender dependency schemas within the context of limited resources allows us to think beyond dichotomies of lower income Damascene women as oppressed by class and patriarchy on the one hand, or over-privilege their agency and resistance on the other. Several points are useful in illustrating this process. First, when women extend gender dependency schemas to income generating activities at home, they create a normative space in which they can work, and are thereby able to increase access to resources.

By embracing gender dependency schemas around women's domesticity, defining their labor as not real work and their wages as insubstantial, these women are able to circumvent norms regarding husbands as sole provider, maintain greater control over their wages and thereby increase their household income. Women accommodate specific dimensions of gender dependency schemas - accepting some gender rules and redefining others - in order to better play the game, in a way that is consistent with core ideals around self in family.

I would describe this process as bending the narrative around gender. The overall structure of gender dependency ostensibly remains unchanged, yet within the constellation of ideas and values that comprise gender dependency schemas, subtle shifts are taking place. To be sure, strategizing work as not work appears to reinforce women's domesticity and limited range of choices.

Yet accommodating this particular dimension of gender dependency schemas provides women access to networks, additional opportunities to interact with others outside the household, and a significant buffer against rising cost of living, as well as family crisis, unemployment, or divorce.

Second, integrating concepts of power and collective identity into theorizing structure and agency raises several questions with regard theories of gender as negotiated in everyday interactions. As Connell (1987) has argued, Agender projects emerge within relations of power, production, and cathexis-- reminding us of the importance of considering state and economic systems, as well as personal relations in conceptualizing gender.

This analysis helps to specify thse processes through which this occurs by illustrating the application of gender dependency schemas within the context of a collectively situated self, as well as specific sets of resources available outside of self and family. On the one hand, the state provides resources such as education and low cost transportation that support women's employment. The state also, however, limits earning potential by setting wages in most industries - effectively creating the conditions in which women's employment is increasingly necessary for families to survive.

International organizations such as the ones with which these women worked provide both alternative schemas around the empowerment and celebration of womanhood and women's work, as well as much needed resources (both income and access to networks of other women).

Those resources and the schemas that support them provide alternative cultural and material leverage that allow women to further bend the narrative around gender dependency- adapting, modifying and potentially replacing elements of gender dependency schemas that often limit women's lives.

Third, recognizing the power of specific groups of men to limit women's agency extends theorizing gender by raising the possibility of human resources as a negation, rather than merely the absence of a positive. The collective power of men limits women's agency not only because men may give or withhold a resource (whether connections or cash), but because doing so binds the hand that even empty might otherwise find an alternative way to work.

As Connell points out (2005), men's empowerment vis-a-vis women should be conceptualized not just as the power of individual men over individual women, nor as an abstracted set of privileges accruing to men in general, but as a collective phenomena embodied and enacted by specific sets of male kin. At this middle range, we see connections among men being used to organize and control access to material resources - resources which in turn both undergird and limit women's agency and reinforce a collectively gendered identity.

In Damascus, the collaborative power of related men - what Joseph (1999) calls Apatriarchal connectivity- plays itself out within a framework of inadequate wages and rising inflation. Were state policies such that men's wages were adequate to support their families, many women would not seek employment. The daily routine of managing a household is enough to consume the creative energy of most.

However, men's wages are not adequate and so women look for ways of generating additional income. The fact that women with limited education are unable to obtain better paying and socially acceptable positions within the bureaucracy, increases the attractiveness of informal labor within the home, and both validates and reinforces the practice of gender dependency schemas vis-a-vis male kin.

Thinking about gender from a perspective in which the collective and relational are more salient than the autonomous self, opens the possibility to reconsider concepts of gender as rooted in enlightenment notions of the rational individual. Such a reconsideration might lead towards a reassessment of the problems associated with conceptualizing women as a collective (Young 1994), as well as the meanings of gender as a collaborative and collective construction, rather than one negotiated in the individual interactions of women and men.

Consistent with Joseph's (1994) analysis of women in Lebanon, a collective sense of gendered identity is central to women's sense of self and their understanding of decisions around paid labor, family and responsible womanhood. This sense of collectively gendered self repeatedly appeared in women's descriptions of how collaborative male power is used to limit and constrain their agency.

It appeared as well in women's accounts of how kin provide a resource and buffer in shielding women from some of the abuses and constraints of male power. Rather than individual relationships negotiated within a particular set of social relations and economic circumstances, women described their experience as relational and corporate - as collective phenomena, not primarily as individual.

Finally, conceptualizing collectively gendered identity within the context of patriarchy and a strong centralized state does not negate women's agency. To be sure, the women with whom I visited were limited by their accommodation to gender dependency schemas. Yet, they also actively manage those schemas in ways that seem good within the constraints of the resources available to them. Both of these processes - those which limit and those which enlarge - must be understood within the context of a broader political economy and the agendas of the state.

In the case of families in Damascus, countervailing trends in state subsidies for basic goods and industries, along with persistent strong support for women's education and vocational training create a context in which women may have skills but few places in which to employ them. Because this analysis is limited to women in lower income households it is not possible to assess here the ways in which these dynamics are different for women in households with greater resources.

Clearly, additional work should consider how different levels of income intersect with gender dependency schemas in ways that accentuate or otherwise constrain women's ability to obtain employment or control wages. It may be that relationship is curvilinear - that control over income increases as women's earnings increase, but only to a point after which men insist on having exclusive control over money (see Ozyegin's (2001) analysis of this phenomena among Muslim families in Turkey).

Examining these processes and relationships across class (something I am beginning to do elsewhere), ought to help broaden our conceptualizations of gender in the Middle East, as well as our theories of gender in general- theories which ought to consider the processes through which women draw on multiple and overlapping schemas and resources in the construction of collectively gendered and socially embedded selves.

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