North American Women

The Past and Present: From North American Women to Women of the Middle East

Introduction to Anthropology

The Past and Present: From North American Women to Women of the Middle East
The female plays a vital role in every culture, but the expectation of a woman is different from North America to the Middle East. American women had to fight for their current rights, but in some countries women are not given the opportunity to fight, or even think it. Both religion and men from the Middle East play a major role in the Islamic woman’s beliefs, education, and even health. Imagine the American women of the past, who were not able to have an education, expected to bare children, expected to wear a dress and had no say in the political world.
Now, let’s travel to the Middle East, present day, notice that time and rules have yet to change for these women. American women’s life before the 1920’s was very similar to the Middle East women of today.
Acts like the 1920’s Woman’s Suffrage Act helped modernize the North American woman. In The Woman Citizen, Stanley Lemons describes Women’s Emancipation as “the elimination of oppressive restrictions imposed by sex”. Men had the power over women for many years in America and that same power is still present in countries such as Morocco, Iraq and Afghanistan. In Empowering Women, Developing Society, by Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi and Valentine M. Moghadam, it states, “Woman in the Middle East region must obtain permission from a male relative, usually a husband or father, before seeking employment, requesting a loan, starting a business, or traveling”. According to Farzaneh’s article, only 20% of Middle East Women are in the labor force. They have the lowest level of employed females than any other region. In the states, that percentage is much higher and steadily
increasing. This same “power of man” is not just responsible for the employment of women, but it extends to their education. When the topic of education is brought up, you will find that men in Old America and in the Middle East both had better education then the women. Women were illiterate, not because they wanted to be, but because they were forced to have that fate. In The Company of Educated Women, by Barbara Soloman, she states, “Education in the last 200 years, has profoundly changed the contours of women’s lives in America”. American women were able to receive an education, but it wasn’t that long ago. The Middle East is just starting to offer education to women, but it is at a very slow pace and is nowhere equal to that of a man’s education. Knowledge is power and it even comes with the ability to prevent illnesses. As female education rises, fertility, population, infant and child mortality decreases and the family’s overall health improves (Farzaneh, 2003). Health has always been a major issue to the North American Society and the Middle East Society. The less education a woman has the less chance she will have to prevent a serious illness or death. The North American women of the past had to suffer severe challenges in child labor and were not equipped to care for a child as the women of today are. This still is a challenge for the Middle Eastern woman. With knowledge comes life!
Education is key to improve an individuals’ well-being and societies’ economic and social development (Farzaneh 2003). If the rest of the society understands this concept, then why is the Middle East so far behind? The answer is simple, it is due to their very strict religion and not knowing any better. The women’s legal status and social positions are worse in Muslim countries than anywhere else in the world (Moghadam, 2003). Muslim women seem to be perceived only as wives, mothers of children and keeper of the house. To put it simply, they are segregated because of their gender. Once ago, this was the same for the North American women of the past. Still today, a Muslim woman is not able to divorce a man, without shaming herself and her family.
The man faces no shame, again just like the North American woman of the past. Presently, North American women are free to marry, divorce, re-marry, and divorce again if she so chooses, without worries of public shame or ridicule. Unfortunately, this shame still resides with the Muslim women. Currently, when a Muslim woman marries it is not because of love, but because her father chose a suitable husband for her at a very early age and she is expected to bare at least six children. Women do not have a say in today’s Muslim society and did not have a say in the past, unlike the voice of an American woman from past to
present.
High Fertility, low literacy, and low labor force participation are commonly linked to the status of woman, which in turn is attributed to the prevalence of Islamic law and norms in the Middle Eastern Societies (Moghadam 2003). Why do Muslim women accept these rules that are given to them by the male population? These women believe that they are treated fairly and it is because of their lack of education and the religious beliefs that they think that it is okay to be treated this way. Now, travel back to the United States: the American woman will not take the same treatment that is given to the Muslim women. In America, you see women wearing what they want and believing in many different religions. They work just as hard as men do and sometimes they even “wear the pants of their relationship”. Wearing pants, figuratively and literally, for a Muslim woman is completely unheard of.
Cultures and religions vary from country to country, but the North American woman and the Middle Eastern woman have just as much similarities as they do differences. The similarities started disappearing when the feminist movement happened in North America and the Middle East stayed the same. People may argue human rights for Muslim women, but it does nothing to satisfy a feminist inquiry about the Woman Muslim. What looks like bad treatment to us, looks like acceptable treatment to them.

Lemons, Stanley J, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920’s, 1973
Solomon, Barbara, In the Company of Educated Women, 1986.
Roudi-Fahimi, Farzaneh, Valentine M. Moghadam, Empowering Women, Developing Society: Female Education in the Middle East and Africa, 2003