A dearth of information is available on workingwomen in the Middle East during the 19th and first half of the 20th century. This gap is compounded by the male biases of the official reporters, journalists, unionists, labor activists, and scholars who produced the information that does exist. Nevertheless, it is possible to write a gendered history of labor on the basis of less-than-ideal sources, which can be enriched by the use of oral history, popular literature, autobiographies, and even fieldwork focused on women's and men's family relations and work patterns.
The primary problem is how to secure complete and comprehensive records of workingwomen's and workingmen's experiences over time at sites of labor and leisure. Workingmen tend to be more visible in standard records and more accessible as subjects of study. To adequately develop gendered perspectives in Middle Eastern labor history, it is important to start gathering the basic quantitative data on workingmen and workingwomen alike by integrating official factory records, sociological surveys, and labor union documents emerging from formal and institutional rubrics such as syndicates, state documents, and political parties, as well as informal social and religious organizations. With this data, we can establish databases designed with gender inquiries in mind.
These new repositories of information can help us to reveal the transformation that working-class people in Middle Eastern societies have undergone in the 20th century. We should try to account for various types of unorganized labor and informal activities that fall outside the scope of leftist movements. Such an accounting will allow scholars to explore the culture and work experiences of those female and male workers who are not politically organized or “class conscious” but who exhibit localized and multifaceted forms of resistance against capital and the state. This means gathering new data on “invisible” female domestic laborers, particularly destitute refugee women who provide unregulated labor around the Middle East. By searching for working-class women and men in the trade unions and socialist parties, many labor historians seem to have dismissed a substantive section of this class and made generalizations that apply primarily to working men. Although the shop floor, the union, and the party are important, there is a need to gather information from other settings and vehicles tied to women's work.
In terms of reconceptualizing the connections between gender and labor in Middle Eastern history, we need a feminist perspective that probes into the male-dominant production and shaping of data by states and international agencies.Footnote 1 A feminist perspective allows one to make the official data on workers gender transparent, showing how inequalities are embedded in the sources of the data themselves. A feminist lens is necessary because men's performance is made central to the workforce, and because gaps and gray areas in the sources are left unexplained.
Studies are needed to redress the sexual imbalance in the writing on women's activism. The feminist lens can detect the male-centered language of labor unions and leftist parties and its bias against female militancy. An array of women's activities against capital and management have gone either unnoticed or were deliberately suppressed by male activists in pursuit of a genderless class solidarity. The experiences of men and women are neither mutually exclusive nor inherently divisive. Historically, relations of class and gender were intertwined in the domicile and the workplace and in processes of production and reproduction. Neither class nor gender constitutes an independent or exclusive source of social cohesion and division in the history of strikes and labor movements in the Middle East.
In this respect, a feminist lens revisits and reinterprets the value that Middle Eastern workingmen placed on a “genderless” struggle during most of the 20th century. This lens reads the term “genderless” as gendered and, more specifically, masculine—a linkage of masculinity and class consciousness that marginalizes women's styles of leadership. Using a feminist prism, one comes to realize that the culture of labor and party activism has hampered workingwomen's ability to develop their specific means and modes of struggle. Women's militancy seems to have been sustained by women's informal networks—associations ranging from social and religious congregations to parochial women's fund cohorts. Anthropological and global studies have offered new possibilities for investigating masculinities and femininities in diverse industrial workplaces and for redefining labor itself.
Culturalist approaches have often been used to account for a wide array of shifts in women's and waged labor in the Middle East. Such approaches emphasize Arab-Islamic customs, patriarchal values, and religious teachings to explain the experiences of workingwomen. The workings of the economy within national and global capitalist frameworks have not been sufficiently investigated when accounting for working-class masculinities and femininities. How do men and women differ in reacting to intensive labor and onerous discipline at the factory? How do they differ in resisting exploitation and organizing themselves politically? How does national labor politics shape the way women negotiate patriarchal values, and the way men redefine them?
Decentering the culturalist approach does not entail a mechanical separation between a domain of “material reality” and a domain of “ideas.” Rather, it involves understanding how the two are tied together and transform over time. As several labor historians have shown, “class” competes and “crossbreeds” with gender, ethnicity, and religion.Footnote 2 Class is experienced through biological femaleness and maleness, which vary in connection to religiously encouraged forms of labor for men and women, and ethnically rewarded roles in the economy. From a feminist perspective, economic inequality, social stigma, and religious discrimination can connect but also separate women from men. As such, working women and men live through multiple experiences of culture, class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, but these categories are neither constantly nor inherently in contradiction with each other. Middle Eastern workingwomen have been known to use family and village connections, as well as the authority of their local religious leaders, to improve their work conditions. Mid-20th-century workingwomen at the Régie in Lebanon, for example, turned to relatives, friends, and coreligionists to solve some of their problems, but pursued class-based action and, at times, militancy to solve others.Footnote 3 While they led protests and effectively organized on the basis of class, their organizational skills and mobilization activities took place largely outside of the rubric of political parties and formal organizations. The gendered reality of cultural norms underwent change, as did workingwomen's and workingmen's relationship to them.
Religious ideas about men's and women's productivity and its links to sexuality are usually reinforced through rituals. It is important to assess how Middle Eastern working-class traditions at different phases and historical junctures approach these ideas. Most of the studies conducted on religious ideas and practices in the Middle East still focus on “Islam” and “Islamic societies.” There is also a tendency to stress the control of “Islam” over how masculinities and femininities are formed, and how they play out in the domains of productivity, sexuality, and identity. The spiritual sensibilities that Muslim workingwomen may express or emphasize are often explained in terms of fixed doctrines outlined in foundational sacred texts, rendering static the normative features of Islamic pietistic traditions. Meanwhile, the personal and contextual interpretations of gendered piety, and alterations made by workingmen and workingwomen to religious ideals, are overlooked. “Islamic” cultural values, for instance, have been heavily stressed to explain women's refrainment from industrial labor and/or collective political action in several Middle Eastern Arab countries.Footnote 4
Workingwomen's awareness of their class interests and collective identity was demonstrated during various phases of 20th-century nation-building in the region. Once told from the disparate perspectives of workingmen and workingwomen, the story of the nation takes new turns. The nation comes to seem less omnipresent as it is challenged and undermined by class and gendered formations. Particular gender–class hierarchies inform how the nation is understood, and how nation-building is pursued. We can learn a lot, then, about how nationalist projects and gendered narratives reinforce each other. In the same vein, it is important to shed light on the gendered implications of state legal codes around labor, and the mechanisms in place for controlling working-class masculinities and femininities. State coercion and violence against workingwomen have attempted to regulate gendered modes of production and division of labor.
Finally, global economic structures and national policies in the Middle East have been responsible for creating new relations between foreign domestic workingwomen and national middle-class women. They have also been responsible for gendering migrant labor. In Lebanon, many African and South Asian women are hired as maids, nannies, and housekeepers, while their male counterparts work as garbage collectors as well as construction and industrial workers. The class complications created by the presence of foreign maids in Lebanese urban and suburban settings, and how it changes the dynamics of domesticity among middle-class women, deserves attention. The disruptions and recasting of gender relations in the Middle Eastern household and in society needs further study. The hierarchies of masculinities and femininities that emerge from the intersection of foreign labor, race, and nation can open up a rich and important field of inquiry.
