Women and Power in the Middle East

The Dialectics of Fashion: Gender and Politics in Yemen

The Dialectics of Fashion Gender and Politics in Yemen Sheila Carapico The situation of Yemeni women is complicated and contradictory . On the one hand, compared with relatively fashionforward Mediterranean Arabs, or even their affluent sisters in the Gulf, Yemeni women appear to be especially oldfashioned . One rarely sees a Yemeni woman outdoors bareheaded , and in the capital, Sana¡a, most women cover their faces in public. Yet outward appearances can be misleading. While it is tempting to assume that women ‘‘still’’ veil because ‘‘tradition’’ tells them to, it is simply wrong to conclude that ‘‘traditionally’’ all women were secluded in their homes, or that how they dress now tells us much about their political and economic status. Clothes do not make the woman: lives are shaped by political currents and economic realities. The public roles and civil rights of Yemeni women have been conditioned by the vicissitudes of national politics, with important differences between North and South.1 Even in the more conservative North, by the 1970s permissive legislation afforded rights of pregnancy leave, voting, driving, travel, property ownership, and public office, and several women gained real national prominence as television broadcasters. Yet only the brightest daughters of educated parents could read. Through the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of urban females left school after a couple of years to become homemakers . Their country cousins, busy from dawn to dusk tending dairy cows, drawing water, collecting fuel and fodder, harvesting crops, and processing food, found respite only in the customary forty-day rest after childbirth or in old age.2 Women’s economic participation in the agrarian economy was 184 SHEILA CARAPICO substantial, and intensified due to massive male migration; but their participation in the modern sector was minuscule.3 After its 1962 republican revolution, North Yemen witnessed the popularization of veiling as the emerging bourgeoisie imitated the prim-andproper ‘‘ladies’’ of the old gentry of the sayyid strata, symbolized by a particular style of full formal black veil called the sharshaf. Customarily, women dressed for the climate and for work, with wraps serving as pockets, sunscreen , and dust protection. In the steamy Tihama coast along the Red Sea, where Arabia meets Africa, women wore bright skirts and skimpy haltertops , layered with a sheer, breezy caftan for going out; in the southern uplands , full, filmy shifts with a bright scarf loosely wrapped about the head, perhaps with a silk abayia for the city. In the cooler Zaydi highlands women wore wide sirwal pants beneath a fitted caftan, with a long scarf tied tightly in such a way that a lithma could be lowered beneath the chin or raised over the nose and mouth, all covered by the item Americans call an India-print bedspread . (Shafa¿i males typically wear a futah or sarong, whereas Zaydis prefer a white thawb, both with a sports jacket; most men cover their heads and, like the movie images of American cowboys, sometimes their faces.) The sharshaf, which rather resembles a nun’s habit, traditionally signified elite women dressed up for afternoon tea. As society changed, however, many women thought in terms of the liberty to sharshaf, because wearing the veil symbolized relief from hard labor, dignity in the marketplace, freedom to study, and equality with the old elite. As they moved to the cities, or as their own communities urbanized, as they were exposed to an opulent Saudi style of hypermodesty, and as they entered school, the new generation of Northern girls adopted the sharshaf, even in Tihami cities where the heat makes them insufferable. Folk dresses became associated with old age and ignorance. In South Yemen, by contrast, or at least in the formerly British colonial port city of Aden, where revolutionaries established the Arab world’s only Marxist regime (the People’s Democratic Republic or PDRY), women enjoyed rights unrivaled in the region. Females represented roughly a third of all Adeni students, teachers, medical personnel, civil servants, and factory workers and a visible minority among lawyers, judges, directors, administrators , middle-level party cadre, and parliamentarians. Courts granted mothers custody of children and the marital home in event of divorce.4 As in the Northern hinterland, however, provincial dress and behavior varied considerably by region: for instance, the tribeswomen of the Mahra mountains were far more assertive and active than the demure housebound sayyidat of Hadrami towns. DIALECTICS OF FASHION: GENDER AND POLITICS IN YEMEN 185 Under the...