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If women working in low-status occupations often have to face censure and rebuke, this is not the case if they are employed in the ‘better’ professions, such as teaching. This chapter addresses women's access to property through such professional work. Since access to (higher) education is a pre-condition for women's entry into the professions, the main trends in women's education will be addressed first. The chapter will then trace the development of professional employment: the opening up of new fields and the professionalisation of other types of work, such as nursing. What such work means for women's access to property ties in with the particular background and position of the women involved. In the mandatory period, professional employment was largely limited to single, urban women from well-known families; gradually, however, some non-urban, married and lower-class women have entered the professions. This change is brought out in the following three labour stories. Employed in the professions: three labour stories Sitt Yusrā, an elderly teacher from Nablus When I asked elderly women who had taught them, they often mentioned the name of Sitt Yusrā. Having started her teaching career in the 1930s, she belonged to one of the earliest generations of Nablus teachers still alive. Born in the late 1910s she was the second girl in a prominent, yet impoverished family of five daughters and one son. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hospital close to where I was staying during the summers of 1988 and 1989 turned out to be an excellent location for meeting poor female wage labourers. Most of the women whose stories are presented in this chapter worked there as cleaners. Although their labour stories differ, they had all started working because of financial need. The girls were from impoverished families, the married women had spouses who were unable to provide for them, and the widows and divorced women had been left to their own devices to earn a living. Whereas rural women who had previously worked as agricultural labourers considered hospital cleaning an improvement, for those women from the camps who used to work in Israel, it was usually a negative choice to which they had to resort, since working in Israel was no longer possible after the intifada. In this chapter, the focus is on two major fields of employment for poor women: agricultural wage labour and domestic service or cleaning. Processes of historical change have had major implications for these types of work. First examined are the wage labour of women, often poor rural widows, in dry-farming agriculture and the circumstances under which some of them have turned to institutional cleaning. This is contrasted with the very different work of refugee women in irrigated agriculture in the Jordan Valley on the one hand, and the work of domestic servants in the private houses of the better-off Nablusi on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deferred dower is very different from the prompt dower as a mechanism for women to gain access to property. Women are entitled to receive the deferred dower only under specific conditions, namely if they are repudiated or widowed. This means that relatively few women can claim their deferred dower and that they do so only at a later moment in their life cycle. In this chapter, the trends in registering a deferred dower are discussed first. The marriage contracts, which are always registered if part of the dower is deferred, indicate that gradually the deferred dower has become more important than the prompt. This discussion looks at the relation between the written texts of marriage contracts and social practice in order to interpret what this means to the women concerned. The case summaries show that women did turn to the court to demand their deferred dower, but divorcees and widows are not proportionally represented. While many more widows than divorced women are entitled to the deferred dower, over two-thirds of the court cases were raised by repudiated women. Why is this? And what happened to those who did not turn to court? Did they receive their deferred dower automatically, or did they refrain from claiming it at all? These questions will be addressed in the following paragraphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What women receive when they marry is the starting point of this chapter. Here I will return to the four women introduced in chapter 2 and discuss their marriage stories in greater detail, adding some of the stories of their daughters and granddaughters for the sake of historical comparison. In the Jabal Nablus region, the prompt dower is registered in two very different ways, either as ‘regular prompt dower’, with the registered sum bearing at least some resemblance to what is given, or as ‘token dower’, when a very small sum is recorded (often 1 JD), creating a complete break between the amount stated in the contracts and the gifts received. These two dower patterns will be discussed successively, with particular attention paid to the divergent meanings registering a token dower can have for different categories of women. Next, the sometimes detailed registration of household goods in the contracts is considered and shifts in the nature of the gifts are discussed. The dower will then be contextualised within the process of socio-economic change by relating the value of the dower to the transfer of property from fathers to sons. Before summarising the historical trends in women's access to property through the dower I will briefly discuss ‘intifada marriages’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I was in Al-Balad in 1981 one of Imm Sālim's granddaughters, Hanān was married. The first time I talked to her the marriage contract had already been signed and with pride she showed me the gifts she had received at the engagement party from Mis'ad, her fiancé. Hanān was pleased with the marriage. Mis'ad was no stranger to her, on the contrary, she had known him all her life. He was not only from the same lineage, but his mother also was her father's sister, while his late father had been her mother's brother. He was only a few years older – she was eighteen at the time, he twenty-two – and had for some years been working in oil production in Kuwait, a job he had found through another brother of his mother who held a good position there for the past twenty-five years. Mis'ad's mother had been the driving force behind the marriage. A widow with only one son (and three younger daughters) she was very attached to him and counted on his support in the future. Therefore, she had carefully selected her future daughter-in-law. Looking for a girl both her son and she herself would get along with, Hanān seemed suitable. Tall and with a light complexion she fit the local standards of beauty, Imm Mis'ad also knew her as compliant and, of course, she was her brother's daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme: lessons from the field It was during my first fieldwork in a West Bank village in 1981 that my attention was drawn to property. I was struck by the restrained eagerness with which elderly rural women told me about the dower gold they had received at marriage and what they had done with it. The anthropological literature on the Middle East which I had read rarely referred to women's access to property and if it did so, then the focus was on women's inheritance rights. Yet when I asked women in the village whether they had received an inheritance share, they seemed somehow ill at ease and emphasised that they had refrained from claiming their rights. Questions abounded. Why did elderly women express pride in the fact that they had bought goats and even land from their dower gold, but show discomfort at the thought of claiming a share in their father's estate? Talking with women from different walks of life further complicated the issue. A superficial reading of the dower system may lead one to interpret it as a transfer of resources from men to women, a system it would seem to be in women's interest to support. Indeed, many rural women considered the dower as an important institution through which they could acquire property. Yet, younger village women rarely expressed an interest in selling their gold to buy productive property; they would rather invest it in their husband and his house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]