The individual cannot help but suffer from such a discordance between the realities of everyday life and the ideas and images stamped into people’s minds. The wider the gap between reality and fantasy (or aspiration), the greater the suffering and the more serious the conflict and tension within us. The psychological cost is just barely tolerable. The fact that we cling to images of virility (economic power) and femininity (consumption of the husband’s fortune) that have nothing whatever to do with real life contributes to making male-female dynamics one of the most painful sources of tension and conflict, for several reasons. The most obvious one is that in the traditional system our identities are primarily sexual. The system of honour binds the reputation of men and women to their genital apparatus. A respectable man is not simply someone who acquires some degree of economic power, but who also controls the sexual behaviour of his wife, daughters, and sisters. But this is possible only if he is able to control their movements, to limit their mobility and thereby to reduce their interaction with the strange men with whom they threaten to ‘sully the family’s honour’. Once again, money and sex are intimately linked in the definition of identity, for both men and women. New ideological systems have emerged (laws, cultural patterns shaped by literature, education, radio and television), and new identity models too, to guide people through these decades of violent economic and spatial upheavals (including the bankruptcy of the territoriality of sex).
The Moroccan people would be a lot happier, and better off economically as well, if a man’s honour and prestige were no longer related to his ability to control his women by stuffing them with chickens and pearls but instead depended on his ability to master solar energy or electronics. Just as they would be happier and better off if a woman’s honour and prestige were no longer related to her spatial immobility, her passive role as consumer, but instead depended on her ability to master solar energy or electronics.
One of the basic changes now occurring is the disappearance of the roles attributed to each sex as elaborated and used by tradition for centuries. Sexual desegregation of space is already on the way, and brings with it sexual desegregation of the economy and the dissolution of boundaries between public and private space so vital for social identity. The greatest battles, the most serious misunderstandings, that women have with the men they love concern this fissure between public and private. ‘You can do that in public but not in private’, ‘you shouldn’t travel or go out alone at that hour’, ‘you shouldn’t talk to another man, even a colleague of ours, when you’re out with your partner’, and so on.
But let us return to the original point: the lack of correspondence between real life and the ideas and patterns that are supposed to express it. This lack of correspondence, to use the ‘noble’ term, is called anomie. According to Durkheim, anomie is a confusion more than an absence of norms. Anomie occurs when
The moral system which has prevailed for centuries is shaken, and fails to respond to new conditions of human life, without any new system having yet been formed to replace that which has disappeared.3
In the case of Moroccan male-female dynamics, sexual desegregation through schooling and the employment of women in non-domestic jobs is a direct attack on the spatial barrier erected by Islam between males and females. But Islam’s division of space between the sexes is not an isolated phenomenon; it is the reflection of a specific distribution of power and authority and a specific division of labour, which together form a coherent social order. Moroccan society has not pushed its social reform in matters of male-female relations as far as the changes in the traditional distribution of power and authority might have warranted; hence the anomie aspect of that relation.
The role of the state as a producer of ideology appears more clearly if we contrast Morocco to another traditional society, China, which underwent an entirely different process of change affecting both reality and ideology. During the phase of nationalist struggle (struggle against external hegemony), Mao Zedong analysed the Chinese situation thus
A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority: 1) the State system (political authority); 2) the clan system (clan authority); and 3) the supernatural system (religious authority). . . . As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three systems of authority, they are also dominated by the men (the authority of the husband). These four authorities . . . are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people.4
One of the first acts of independent China was the promulgation, on 1 May 1950, of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, whose first article states
The arbitrary and compulsory feudal marriage system which is based on the superiority of men over women and which ignores the children’s interests is abolished.
The Chinese man is not burdened by the duty to support his wife as well as himself. The Chinese woman is not limited to biological reproduction and sexual services. She is urged to earn her own living as a productive economic agent. Consequently, the Chinese male is encouraged not to think of himself only as a sexual being, but primarily as an economic agent and a person with multiple potentials and capacities.
Change is a painful process, but it becomes bearable to the individual if the degree of ambiguity and contradiction is lessened by the availability of coherent new behaviour models.5 The Chinese husband suffers less than his Moroccan counterpart because the former at least knows exactly what new attitude he is expected to have towards his wife’s work.
Both husband and wife shall have the right to free choice of occupation and free participation in work or in social activities.6
The Moroccan husband, on the other hand, is faced with anxiety-provoking ambiguities. This is epitomized in the Moroccan Code’s endorsement of the man’s right to control his wife’s access to the outside world.7 It is a masterpiece of ambiguity and a mine of potential conjugal discord. In traditional Morocco, the man’s prestige is embodied in the seclusion of his female relatives. A man whose wife wanders around the streets free is a man whose masculinity is in jeopardy. Article 35 of the Code states that among the woman’s rights vis-a-vis her husband is the right to visit her parents, implying that she has no other right to leave the house without her husband’s permission. Although sexual equality was proclaimed in the Moroccan constitution in the name of equality between all citizens, the right to leave the house, and thus by implication the right to work outside the home (which assumes a particular importance in a traditionally segregated setting), was not granted by Moroccan legislators to the female citizen. On the contrary, the need for women to negotiate such rights with their husbands is emphasized.
Since the system holds – and the law confirms – that a woman’s place is in the home and that her access to offices and factories is subject to her husband’s authorization, women are reminded whenever they get jobs that it is a privilege and not a right. Moreover, the husband is encouraged to perceive his wife and her salary as belonging to him, since she requires his permission to earn her salary. (In fact, in spite of the 1957 Code’s uncompromising stand on the separation of properties and on the woman’s uncontested right to manage her own property, the husband’s claim to his wife’s salary is a recurrent subject of dispute in Moroccan courts.8)
One can imagine the frustration and resentment the Moroccan male is likely to experience, trapped as he is between a law that gives him the right to control his wife’s movements and the economic necessity that forces her to take a job. The gap between the sexual ideology reflected by the laws and the way most people live their lives is a sign of the absence of a genuine modern moral system.
The nationalist movement, which initiated and supported changes in women’s position in society, has failed to carry out its post-independence task of socio-economic regeneration. Whatever the reasons, the unhappy fate of the nationalist movement had disastrous implications for sexual desegregation and the prospects of an integrated women’s liberation in which ideology and reality reflect each other i
n a coherent structure. The present situation is characterized by a flagrant discrepancy between women’s newly acquired rights to traditionally male spaces such as streets, offices, and classrooms, and the traditional ideology according to which such rights are clear cases of trespass.
Education for Women
Education for women has been a major factor in sexual desegregation. It is associated with Westernization, but it would be a mistake to attribute it to French influence alone.9 This idea of France as a ‘modernizing’ force is a colonial fantasy, since the French protectorate actually helped bring about an astonishing consolidation of traditions and breathed new life into existing hierarchies and inequalities. Here, for instance, is a quotation from a book by André Révérand on General Lyautey, dealing with the general’s attitude to Moroccan culture. What fascinated the general, and Révérand after him, was the ‘aristocratic’ dimension of Moroccan society.
His [Lyautey’s] letter of 29 March 1913 to Wladimir d’Ormesson is a marvellous illustration of the profound meeting of the minds between the Moroccans and the general: the same taste for tradition, the same aristocratic sense, the same respect for hierarchy, the same innate chivalrous, even ‘aristocratic’ concept of life. Greeted as a lord, he received as a lord.10
The protectorate, presented even today as a cataclysmic time of cultural upheaval, actually served as a bridge permitting the consolidation of hierarchies and the continuation of inegalitarian ideologies in which sex inequalities played a basic part. (A feminist reading of the history of the protectorate and independence would clearly reveal the real direction of trends and ideology during these decades, which are often associated not with continuity but with change.) French policy, inspired by General Lyautey, who liked to think of himself as a great humanist and philosopher, was to respect Moroccan traditions whenever they were not in open contradiction with French interests. For example, the traditional landowning system conflicted with French interests and was entirely dismantled. But the Moroccan family structure, which did not conflict, became the object of an exotic respect. In fact, many of the laws concerning women introduced during the French protectorate compounded the burdens of local traditions with the misogynist dementia of the Napoleonic Code. The legal articles on obligations and contracts concerning women in financial transactions, as well as the articles in the penal code on ‘crimes of passion’, are gifts of super-patriarchal French civilization and are in complete contradiction with the principles of the shari’a.
The introduction of schooling for girls, for example, cannot be explained without taking account of the nationalist movement that swept Morocco’s urban centres in the thirties and forties. At first this movement, as a dissident struggle, was compelled to challenge all inequalities, including sexual ones. Nationalists held a particularly optimistic belief in Morocco’s ability to rejuvenate its structures, revitalize. itself, shake off futile anachronisms, and bridge the centuries separating it from the industrial world. By 1942 schooling for women, unthinkable a few decades before, was advocated by the nationalists as a necessity. They wanted to defeat the French at any cost, even if it meant interfering in the family structure.
Under these circumstances Moroccan girls were pushed into classrooms, entrusted to male teachers, and allowed to walk through the streets four times a day. All these events were indeed unusual, but everything was unusual in Morocco in 1942.
Finally, on the second of the month of Muharram in the year 1362 [that is, November 1942 of the Christian calendar] a Moroccan delegation was received by His Majesty and was given a most warm welcome. He himself saw no problem in allowing men to teach Arabic to Muslim girls. Some days later there was a gathering of young people from Fez, Rabat, and Sale at the Palace where His Majesty was presiding at the Council of Ministers. These young people were admitted to participate in the discussions of the issue at hand. The meeting lasted two hours and the following decisions were made: age for entering school [for girls] 7 years of age; for leaving school 13 years. For the programme of primary education for girls, teachers of Arabic were chosen and designated directly by His Majesty.11
The ‘young people’ who went to see the king about the matter of girls’ education were nationalist militants, and ‘His Majesty’ was Muhammad V, who puzzled the entire country in 1943 when he presented his daughter, Princess Aisha, unveiled before the nation. The liberation of women was considered by the nationalists as an absolutely necessary step in the strategy to defeat the French Christians. The nationalist leader Allal al-Fasi did not forget women when he participated in drafting an ‘Arab Charter’ during the same period.
The state must provide gratuitously a basic minimum in the following spheres:
a. maternity, motherhood, child care ...
The state must ensure to individuals the following rights in the field of production:
c. . . . enabling women to perform their duties in society.12
The number of girls in primary schools rose from 15,080 in 1947,13 to 186,330 in 1957, and to 423,005 in 1971.14 The movement for women’s education apparently snowballed, because starting in 1945 girls did not leave school at thirteen as had been decided by the nationalists; they had gained access to secondary schools. Seven percent of Moroccan girls between ages 14 and 19 are now in secondary establishments; correspondingly for boys, 14 percent.15 According to government figures, 92,006 girls were enrolled in secondary schools in 1971, but only a token number of girls made it to the universities.16 At present the number of women holding primary-school diplomas in the urban centres is higher than the number of men. According to the ‘Results of the Inquiry Into Urban Employment’ (issued by the Bureau of Statistics in Rabat in 1976), among people more than ten years old 69 percent of females and 63 percent of males have primary-school diplomas. As for secondary schools, despite pressures on young girls to marry early, nearly one-third of them manage to get high-school diplomas (29 percent, compared with 33 percent of boys). Finally, about half of the 4 percent of the urban population that have degrees in higher education are women.
The insistence of Moroccan women in demanding access to education is shown by a number of indicators, in particular their better grades than boys and their unshakeable will to continue their studies after marriage and children. Only a dozen years ago, marriage was regarded .as marking an end to any young wife’s educational aspirations. But it is now typical, especially among the younger generations, for young women to go back to school after getting married and having children. Happiness in modem Morocco, it seems, requires more than a pretty and nicely made-up face. A solid education has become a necessity, as vital to status as beauty. Female access to education and the job market, especially among the middle class, is one of the most important aspects of the social dynamic in contemporary Morocco.17
Even though the rate of schooling of girls seems now to have stabilized after a period of rapid rise, and even though it remains blocked in the rural regions and among the poorer layers, it is nevertheless the case that the infiltration of women into classroom and office, and consequently into the street, represents a wide and radical breach in the traditional system.
Although the percentage of females in school is ridiculously low by Western standards, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as insignificant. Since sexual segregation is primarily a symbolic spatial confinement of women, just a few women strolling along the streets in an unhurried fashion can upset society’s psychic equilibrium.
Jobs for Women
Jobs for women, their access to positions in which their contribution is remunerated with a wage, is probably the most striking manifestation of the end of an epoch and a system, even if Moroccan legislators and ideologues continue to lull the population with the myth of the man with the fat wallet who showers his women with exotic fruit and rare jewels. What is new, and laden with consequences, is not the mere fact of women working (Moroccan women of the poor classes have always worked18), but the fact that they are working in positions in which they a
re paid wages. In traditional Moroccan society only women of the plutocracy were inactive and led lives of leisure. The others worked hard, often without any remuneration whatever, in domestic services and also in economic sectors like crafts and agriculture, which were by no means unimportant in the precapitalist economy. The women of Rabat-Sale run an export-oriented crafts industry. If the female peasants of the Rif, of the Doukkala plain, or of the Gharb region decided to stop working both inside and outside the home, the life of these regions would be seriously disrupted. But the colossal daily labour of these women is usually unpaid. One of the most common statuses among the primary sector, or at least among its women, is ‘family aid’, which means unpaid worker.19
What is of interest to us here, then, is not the mere fact that women are working, for only the most simple-minded can continue to claim that Moroccan women ‘went out’ to work in 1956, the year of independence. Sensible people must place female labour in its historical context. The phrase lmra lhaddama (the working woman) refers to women who work in an economic space separate from their domicile and who receive a wage. This is a specific phenomenon – female labour performed outside the home, for an employer wholly foreign to the family, and paid for with a wage – that is not only a novelty but also challenges the sexual division of labour in society. Nevertheless, to grasp the trends of conflict now being generated by the aspirations of Moroccan working women we must first consider the general conditions of female employment as they emerged in the 1971 census.20
According to the official census, while the employment rate for men is nearly stagnant, the women’s rate has shown a tremendous increase. In the period between 1960 and 1971, this rate increased 75 percent. In urban areas, where women’s labour is more easily assessed, the number of working women has doubled.
Beyond the Veil Page 16