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Acknowledgments
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xvii Acknowledgments This research was supported by grants in 1992 from the American Sociological Association/National Science Foundation Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline and in 1993 from the National Conference on Family Relations, Feminism and Family Studies Section, Jessie Bernard Award for Outstanding Research Proposal from a Feminist Perspective. Fieldwork in the spring and summers of 1995–97 was made possible by a serial grant from the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars , Fulbright Scholar Award. Fieldwork during the summer of 1999 and in February 2001 was aided by travel grants provided by Oregon State University. I made three additional trips to Damascus: in the summers of 2004 and 2008, supported in part by grants from Oregon State University, and in June 2011 as forty years of rule by the al-Asad family was being challenged in Syria’s own version of the region’s Arab Spring. I owe a debt of gratitude to each of these sources of travel and research support that made this book possible. I also owe an immeasurable debt to the girls and women who shared their lives, in many cases their growing up, with me over nearly two decades. Their generosity, humanity, courage, and ready smiles have been a source of both personal and professional enrichment. I hope they have gained something from our time together as well. Special thanks to Amal for her friendship and insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and to Rula for her encouragement and insight into Westerners writing about women in Damascus. Thanks also to Um Ramsie, Teresa, and Um Sami, whose years of teaching and development work in the region, hospitality, and insights have been much appreciated. I am grateful to the sociology faculty at Oregon State University for their support over the years. Joe Hendricks (who brought me to Oregon State), xviii | Acknowledgments Rebecca Warner, Janet Lee, Kristin Barker, Sheila Cordray, and Mark Edwards offered support and helped clarify my thinking and writing at numerous points along the way. Any misrepresentations, errors, or omissions are of course my own. I especially thank my immediate family, each of whom accompanied me on one or more trips to Damascus. My son, Andrew, has been with me most frequently—beginning when he was a toddler until he graduated from high school. His presence opened up innumerable conversations on marriage, parenting, work, and family. He conferred upon me the invaluable identity of “Um Andraus” in a community where my motherhood was as important, if not more important, than my status as a professor. Thanks also to my mother, who at the adventurous age of seventy-one accompanied me in 1997, giving me the opportunity to demonstrate in person that not all Americans “throw out” their older parents, as was repeatedly suggested to me as the standard gerontological practice of the West. My deepest thanks and appreciation go to my husband, Ed, who also accompanied me on several of the earlier visits. His willingness to put his own life on hold to support this project did much to legitimize me as a respectable married woman and opened up avenues of conversation with other couples and unmarried men with whom I would have less easily talked on my own. I am just as grateful for the times when he did not come to Damascus with me but willingly shouldered a triple shift at home so that I could continue this work. Finally, my thanks to Laura, who in no small way is responsible for my beginning this research. [3.145.108.9] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 04:31 GMT) Making Do in Damascus ...