Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender

5. Women’s Gold: Shifting Styles of Embodying Family Relations

5 Women’s Gold: Shifting Styles of Embodying Family Relations Annelies Moors Positionings Although mainstream history remains by and large national history that focuses on the public activities of prominent men, the study of both family history and women’s history over the past few decades has rapidly developed into a presence of its own. My contribution on women’s gold as the embodiment of family relations stands at the intersection of these two fields, an intersection that is both a source of inspiration and a site of epistemological struggle. Women’s history started out to restore women to history, in particular in that area of life where they had been so glaringly absent—that is, the public sphere—and aimed at making the hitherto hidden achievements of women visible. The early generation of feminist scholars was reluctant to deal with the family as a topic of research, as they considered this institution a major source of women’s oppression.1 Much work of family historians, on the other hand, focused on the ways in which households or families developed common strategies to deal with the effects of major socioeconomic transformations. Women’s history and family history highlight very different “fields of experience” of women.2 More recently, theoretical developments have created a space for greater interaction of family history and women’s history. Different 101 102 Annelies Moors notions of person, identity, and power have stimulated a renewed investigation of the concepts “women” and “the family.” Rather than taking these as “given” social facts that only need to be discovered, they are seen as socially and culturally constructed. This paradigmatic shift has produced such notions as “the multiple identities of women” and has underlined the importance of taking the diversity in family constructions and relations into account. Concepts of power have also shifted from simple dichotomies of domination versus subordination to more complex notions that point to the ambivalences and contradictions present in particular positions.3 These developments have inspired those involved in women’s history to direct their attention to “the family” and to research the often crucial importance of family relations for women’s lives. At the same time, a focus on gender has evoked some of the most productive critiques of conventional family studies.4 One central problem of family studies is that the household or family is seen as the unit of analysis and as an actor in its own right. Starting from the dichotomy of the domestic sphere versus that of the market, it is assumed that the circulation of goods and labor that takes place within households is fundamentally different from that between households. Whereas relations within the household are seen as “naturally” based on reciprocity, pooling, sharing, and sacrifice, relations in the public sphere are seen as based on unequal exchange, profit maximization, bureaucratic anonymity, and so on.5 These assumptions have been criticized along various lines. Relations within households are not necessarily based on reciprocity, but may well be a form of unequal exchange with a sexual division of labor that makes women dependent on men and with rights to consumption that are based on positions of authority rather than on need. An emphasis on separate spheres neglects and negates the crucial connections between the domestic and the public sphere, and the relations of family members with noncoresident kin and nonkin.6 Furthermore, the notion of the household as the unit of analysis has encouraged a focus on household composition rather than on family relations. This is evident in some historical studies that deal with the shift from extended to nuclear family households and with the ways in which this shift relates to processes of urbanization, industrialization, and state formation.7 Women’s history has convincingly argued for the need to deconstruct the notion of “the family”; women and men (as husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and so on) are positioned differently within families , and processes of recruiting new members are also gender specific. This is not to say that the notion of “the family” may not be powerful. The point is that instead of taking this as the natural state of affairs, Women’s Gold 103 there is a need to investigate at which moments, within which contexts , and under which conditions men and women identify with “the family” and when they see their interests as divergent (or act “as if”). In this contribution I will focus...