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Gendered Expressions of Labor in the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2016

Malek Abisaab*
Affiliation:
Department of History, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; e-mail: malek.abisaab@mcgill.ca

Extract

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.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Sjoberg, Laura and Via, Sandra, eds., Gender, War and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, foreword by Cynthia Enloe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010), xi–xiiGoogle Scholar.

2 See Quataert, Donald and Zurcher, Erik Jan, eds., Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995)Google Scholar; and Bahl, Vinay, The Making of the Indian Working Class: The Case of the Tata Iron and Steel Co., 1880–1946 (New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 See Abisaab, Malek, Militant Women of a Fragile Nation (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

4 See Hijab, Nadia, Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abisaab, Malek, “Contesting Space: Gendered Discourse and Labor among Lebanese Women,” in Geographies of Muslim Women, ed. Falah, Ghazi and Nagel, Caroline (New York: Guilford Publications, 2005), 249–74Google Scholar.