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Conclusion
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117 Conclusion Patriarchal control of women, communal and familial control of women’s conduct took a different shape in 1882, on the eve of British occupation of Egypt, than they had but half a century earlier. New actors were now policing the conduct of women and girls. Policemen arrested runaway daughters and slaves— women who could not satisfactory explain their presence outdoors in unconventional hours—and brought them to the police station. Hakimas examined young women’s hymens for signs of premarital defloration, allegedly producing a narrative that girls themselves were concealing or even denying. Midwives were obliged to report births, which made illegitimate babies harder to conceal. Under pressure both from above and from below, these measures were supplementing and sometimes replacing community and family mechanisms at a time when these social networks themselves were transforming. These new measures counteracted the gradual dissolution of solidarity networks following changes in land ownership, mass conscription to the army and the corvée, and rural immigration . As the urban neighborhood’s social composition was changing, the city became more anonymous and therefore more difficult to control. A social history of Khedival state formation, as outlined in this book, is a history of social transformations within and between communities. It entails asking precisely what it was about the new state that came to be felt in everyday life. Policing women, especially their mobility and visibility in public space, became one site in which modern state power was articulated. My argument throughout this volume was that the state as an abstraction became a tangible reality through interactions between policemen, hakimas, individual women, and their families. Modern state power was realized when the police station became a venue for resolving disputes, for reclaiming manumission papers, or for having an assailant 118 | Policing Egyptian Women punished. The “state” was not a coherent, preconceived entity that extended its gaze to new domains; instead, these new domains created this abstract, but yet very real, state power. The different categories of women described here all had complex relationships to the normative family and community. For many women, abolition and mass manumission meant exclusion from what they had known as home and family for most of their lives. Some of them chose to remain as servants in households that previously enslaved them rather than face the uncertainties of freedom. Many others had to fend for themselves in an urban society that continued to see them as part of the domestic scene and offered little employment opportunities. Racial prejudice hampered their integration in free society, and the absence of kin and other support networks impeded their economic survival. State handling of prostitutes epitomized social and official ambiguity toward male and female sexuality. Prostitution was neither criminalized nor regularized ; it remained part of the urban landscape, yet it was required to be invisible. The police, the shaykhs, and neighborhood communities were concerned with suppressing and controlling the presence of prostitutes in public space: ordering them to cover themselves more when walking the streets, restricting their residence near “respectable” families, and forbidding them to solicit clients outside their doors. Policing prostitutes had a lot to do with restricting their interactions with “respectable” women. Because female sexuality was viewed as treacherous, any such interaction could easily turn the respectable mother, daughter, or wife into a prostitute. These concerns, coupled with prostitutes’ own choices of residence , shaped the geography of prostitution in Egypt’s urban centers. This fear that the honorable woman would become a prostitute also affected social handling of premarital sex. The proverbial neighbor mentioned in an epigraph in chapter 4 (but one who unfortunately has two eyes), the family, the police, courts, and councils policed not only promiscuity but all “suspicious” behavior of young women who ventured into public space. Women who lost their virginity before marriage had to reclaim their respectability at the police station, councils, and courts and had to learn to narrate their bodily experiences according to legal expectations. Finally, the hakimas were both “policed” and “policing.” At the intrusive state’s behest, they examined other women for violations against the female body. [44.220.43.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:43 GMT) Conclusion | 119 At the same time, they were policed and controlled themselves, in order to make them respectable enough to become a tool in controlling morbidity, mortality, and young women’s sexuality. In the introduction, I argued that neither the “disciplined self” nor the “resisting agent” are sufficient analytical tools for understanding women’s...