Things have changed. I know that when I contemplate the future of my children (boy 23, girl 13) I anticipate that the girl is much more likely to wind up being responsible for the family (alone) than the boy. Most men I have known can and do walk way. Most women cannot and do not. Therefore, quite unlike my father's generation, in my children's generation, it is the women who will be raised to be the bread winners.
I guess others are seeing the same thing, and this is some of what's behind the rise in women's education and access to the professions.
Joanna
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>The trend of women besting men first in education and then in certain
>hitherto male-dominated professions has existed in recent decades in
>many countries, and it is here in Algeria as well. New women of
>Algeria are both more religious and more modern than their
>foremothers. -- Yoshie
>
><http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/world/africa/26algeria.html>
>May 26, 2007
>A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women
>By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
>
>ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal
>Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet
>revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and
>political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.
>
>Women make up 70 percent of Algeria's lawyers and 60 percent of its
>judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more
>to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are
>women, university researchers say.
>
>In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian
>women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and
>taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.
>
>Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women
>still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than
>twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over
>the machinery of state as well.
>
>"If such a trend continues," said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher
>of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, "we will see a
>new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled
>by women."
>
>The change seems to have sneaked up on Algerians, who for years have
>focused more on the struggle between a governing party trying to stay
>in power and Islamists trying to take that power.
>
>Those who study the region say they are taken aback by the data but
>suggest that an explanation may lie in the educational system and the
>labor market.
>
>University studies are no longer viewed as a credible route toward a
>career or economic well-being, and so men may well opt out and try to
>find work or to simply leave the country, suggested Hugh Roberts, a
>historian and the North Africa project director of the International
>Crisis Group.
>
>But for women, he added, university studies get them out of the house
>and allow them to position themselves better in society. "The dividend
>may be social rather than in terms of career," he said.
>
>This generation of Algerian women has navigated a path between the
>secular state and the pull of extremist Islam, the two poles of the
>national crisis of recent years.
>
>The women are more religious than previous generations, and more
>modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape
>their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go to
>the mosque — and they work, often alongside men, once considered
>taboo.
>
>Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and
>wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in
>effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed
>by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night,
>but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the
>evening prayer at a mosque.
>
>"They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the
>hijab," said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city
>bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.
>
>The impact has been far-reaching and profound.
>
>In some neighborhoods, for example, birthrates appear to have fallen
>and class sizes in elementary schools have dropped by nearly half. It
>appears that women are delaying marriage to complete their studies,
>though delayed marriage is also a function of high unemployment. In
>the past, women typically married at 17 or 18 but now marry on average
>at 29, sociologists said.
>
>And when they marry, it is often to men who are far less educated,
>creating an awkward social reality for many women.
>
>Khalida Rahman is a lawyer. She is 33 and has been married to a night
>watchman for five months. Her husband was a friend of her brothers who
>showed up one day and proposed. She immediately said yes, she
>recalled.
>
>She describes her life now this way: "Whenever I leave him it is just
>as if I am a man. But when I get home I become a woman."
>
>Fatima Oussedik, a sociologist, said, "We in the '60s, we were
>progressive, but we did not achieve what is being achieved by this
>generation today." Ms. Oussedik, who works for the Research Center for
>Applied Economics and Development in Algiers, does not wear the hijab
>and prefers to speak in French.
>
>Researchers here say the change is not driven by demographics; women
>make up only a bit more than half of the population. They said it is
>driven by desire and opportunity.
>
>Algeria's young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in
>the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their
>efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole
>class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a
>combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.
>
>Increasingly, the people here have lost faith in their government,
>which draws its legitimacy from a revolution now more than five
>decades old, many political and social analysts said. In recent
>parliamentary elections, turnout was low and there were 970,000
>protest votes — cast by people who intentionally destroyed their
>ballots — nearly as many as the 1.3 million votes cast in support of
>the governing party.
>
>There are regular protests, and riots, all over the country, with
>people complaining about corruption, lack of services and economic
>disparities. There are violent attacks, too: bombings aimed at the
>police, officials and foreigners. A triple suicide bombing on April 11
>against the prime minister's office and the police left more than 30
>people dead.
>
>In that context, women may have emerged as Algeria's most potent force
>for social change, with their presence in the bureaucracy and on the
>street having a potentially moderating and modernizing influence on
>society, sociologists said.
>
>"Women, and the women's movement, could be leading us to modernity,"
>said Abdel Nasser Djabi, a professor of sociology at the University of
>Algiers.
>
>Not everyone is happy with those dynamics. Some political and social
>analysts say the recent resurgence in radical Islamist activity,
>including bombings, is driven partly by a desire to slow the social
>change the country is experiencing, especially regarding women's role
>in society.
>
>Others complain that the growing participation of women in society is
>a direct violation of the faith.
>
>"I am against this," said Esmail Ben Ibrahim, an imam at a
>neighborhood mosque near the center of the city. "It is all wrong from
>a religious point of view. Society has embarked on the wrong path."
>
>The quest for identity is a constant undercurrent in much of the
>Middle East. But it is arguably the most complicated question in
>Algeria, a nation whose borders were drawn by France and whose people
>speak Berber, Arabic and French.
>
>After a bitter experience with French occupation and a seven-year
>revolutionary war that brought independence in 1962 at the cost of
>hundreds of thousands of lives, the leaders here chose to adopt Islam
>and Arab identity as the force to unify the country. Arabic replaced
>French as the language of education, and the French secular curriculum
>was replaced with a curriculum heavy on religion.
>
>At the same time, girls were encouraged to go to school.
>
>Now, more than four decades later, Algeria's youth — 70 percent of the
>population is under 30, researchers said — have grown up with Arabic
>and an orientation toward Middle Eastern issues. Arabic-language
>television networks like Al Jazeera have become the popular reference
>point, more so than French television, observers here said.
>
>In the 1990s radical Islamist ideas gained popular support, and
>terrorism was widely accepted as a means to win power. More than
>100,000 people died in years of civil conflict. Today most people say
>the experience has forced them to reject the most radical ideas. So
>although Algerians are more religious now than they were during the
>bloody 1990s, they are more likely to embrace modernity — a partial
>explanation for the emergence of women as a societal force, some
>analysts said.
>
>That is not the case in more rural mountainous areas, where women
>continue to live by the code of tradition. But for the time being,
>most people say that for now the community's collective consciousness
>is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists
>or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.
>
>There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly
>be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely
>rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to
>return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of
>the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.
>
>Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are
>brimming with enthusiasm.
>
>"I don't think any of this contradicts Islam," said Wahiba Nabti, 36,
>as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. "On the
>contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway, it is between you and
>God."
>
>Ms. Nabti wore a black scarf covering her head and a long black gown
>that hid the shape of her body. "I hope one day I can drive a crane,
>so I can really be financially independent," she said. "You cannot
>always rely on a man."
>
>--
>Yoshie
>
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