Status of Palestinian women is changing ever so slowly

By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press

Transcribed from the clipping

EL BIREH, Occupied West Bank (AP) — Sahar Sleim gets up at 4 a.m., sews blouses for Israeli shops for a dollar apiece, then throughout the day cooks, cleans, oversees her children's homework, sews again and collapses into bed at 9 p.m. Her husband, Walid, often gripes when he comes home from his tailor shop because Sahar has no time for him.

But she is quietly resisting his growing demands to give up her job. “I work so my children can finish university,” Mrs. Sleim says from behind the sewing machine in her living room. “I want my daughters to be independent. I want them to get an education and only then to marry. I don't want them to repeat my mistakes.” Mrs.

Sleim, 38, married Walid, a distant cousin, at age 19 under pressure from her father. She had hoped to study engineering by correspondence with Beirut University, but the dream died when the first of her six children was born. “If I could choose now between a husband and university, I would choose university,” Mrs. Sleim says bitterly. “Sewing blouses is not enough.” Mrs.

Sleim is among a growing number of younger Palestinian women who want to be more than housewives and mothers, completely subservient to fathers, brothers and husbands. The social mores in the occupied lands are no different from most of the Arab world.

But 25 years under Israeli occupation have exposed the West Bank and Gaza Strip to a Western industrialized society where contraceptives, college and careers are available to both sexes. Palestinian women's status has also been boosted, ironically, by resistance to occupation. Women have played a prominent role in the five-year uprising in the occupied territories.

But a full-scale feminist revolt seems far away. Women keep their complaints among themselves. Open dissent is severely dealt with: a daughter faces beatings, even banishment from the family, if she gets a job against her father's wishes. In rare cases, unmarried women who eloped were killed by their fathers or brothers for besmirching the family honor.

Still, some feminists see hope. They point to the negotiations with the Israelis for limited Palestinian self-rule in the territories as an opening. “Perhaps it will be the start of establishing a new society,” says Zuheira Kamal, an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team.

But women will have to fight for any gains because the Palestinians' struggle for a state overrides all else, she adds. For example, the Palestinian team appointed Kamal to draft women's rights legislation, such as equal pay, to be considered under autonomy. But she says she got the go-ahead only after much pleading.

While many younger Palestinian women say they want change, they dislike what they see as the lonely and often frenetic lives of their Western sisters. “I would like Palestinian women to be free, but within the framework of Arab tradition,” says Mrs. Sleim, who lives in El Bireh, a town just north of Jerusalem. “The family should stay strong.

I don't want to turn my children loose when they are 18.” Indeed, the traditional life has much to offer, especially the warmth and security of family. Household chores and child care are shared by many. After a woman gives birth, female relatives for the first weeks take care of her house and the older children.

Women can drop off their kids at a relative's without prior notice. Mothers, daughters and neighbors often cook together while sitting in a circle and chatting. The elderly are cared for at home, and old-age homes are unheard of. But the system only works because every family member obeys the rules, which are enforced by men.

Fathers and older brothers decide whether girls should study and whom they should marry. Husbands determine how many children the wife will have, what the wife should wear, where she should socialize. Divorcees are stigmatized. Polygamy is still practiced, though it is more rare than in the past, and men can get a divorce more easily than women.

“Our lives are full of the fear of men,” says Hania Aswad, a 22-year-old women's rights activist. Hanna Saed, 43, from the West Bank refugee camp of Dheishe near Bethlehem, said her father pulled her out of school at age 14 and engaged her to his friend's son, 17-year-old Ismail, to cement ties between the two families.

“I used to cry when I watched my brothers prepare their books for the new school year. If I had been allowed, I would have finished school and become a teacher,” says Mrs. Saed, smoothing her traditional red-on-black embroidered robe and white head scarf in a nervous gesture. Married at age 15, Mrs.

Saed moved in with her in-laws in Dheishe where she cooked and cleaned for a 13-member household. A year later, the young couple moved into its own home, a one-room shack in Dheishe furnished with a gas cooker, two beds, a table and chairs, and an outhouse and well. Here, Mrs. Saed raised three girls and three boys on Ismail's meager income as an olive wood carver.

The children slept on mattresses that were stacked during the day, and took turns at the table to do their homework. Mrs. Saed says she still cannot leave the house without her husband's permission. Like Sahar Sleim, Mrs. Saed stakes her hopes on education.

A proud smile comes over her soft face when she describes how she kept her three daughters in school despite objections from her father-in-law. The oldest, Maha, is a lab technician, and Suzanna and Noha are honor students in high school. Education is one area where many of the 900,000 women in the occupied lands have made great strides. In 1970, 65 percent had no schooling.

Twenty years later, that number was down to around 30 percent. The percentage of women attending university rose from 0.5 to 6.2 in the West Bank, and from 0.5 to 4.9 in Gaza during that period. Still, only some 30,000 Palestinian women, most of them single, work outside the home.

Most have menial jobs, cleaning for Israelis, picking fruit or working in Palestinian and Israeli factories. The law obliges Israeli employers to pay basic social benefits, but some dodge it by hiring unregistered workers. And the law doesn't apply in the occupied territories.

The 20,000 women working there have no medical insurance and only after 15 years on the job are they entitled to a small pension, said researchers at the Women's Studies Center near Jerusalem. A female factory worker earns an average of $170 a month, or enough to buy a food processor or 10 sacks of rice. In some areas, wages are as low as $28 a month. Males average $300.

Pieceworkers like Mrs. Sleim get just over $1 dollar to sew a blouse and 75 cents for a pair of jeans. Women with college degrees become teachers, bookkeepers and clerical workers. Only a few have made a career in business. It is the educated women who often face the toughest choice between tradition and Western ideas.

Most women still follow the traditional path of housewife and mother. Though no statistics are available, the average number of children is estimated down from nine to six since the 1960s, and Palestinian women still have one of the world's highest birth rates.

Context added by this archive

The same Associated Press dispatch The Grand Rapids Press ran three days earlier as a full page under the headline Women in waiting. This printing gives the women courtesy titles the other does not, and stops at the birth rate.

Everything after it — the 47 women killed and 3,000 detained since 1987, the rise in wife-beating, the marriage age falling from 20 to 17, and Zuheira Kamal's closing line — is not in this version.

Cite this item

"Status of Palestinian women is changing ever so slowly," The Jonesboro Sun, 10 January 1993. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1993-015. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1993-015