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Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought

October 23, 2024 at 2:51 pm

Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought
  • Book Author(s): Susanna Ferguson
  • Published Date: September 2024
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • Paperback: 332 pages
  • ISBN-13: 978-1503640061

Childbearing and motherhood became intensely political in the Arab World from the 19th century onwards; how Arab thinkers in Beirut and Cairo saw democratisation, progress, civilisational development and economic growth had a gendered aspect to it. Susanna Ferguson’s Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought charts debates around politics through the evolution of the concept of tarbiya, which in the pre-modern period was less strictly defined, but was often used in the contexts of a teacher cultivating, developing or guiding students, it was transformed into a concept that meant mother’s raising and educating their children. Tarbiya became exclusively a feminine concept, something women do, specifically within the home. The domestication of women was seen as an imperative for economic, political, social and democratic development within the Arab World. The work spans intellectual history, ranging from 1850 to 1939 and tells the story of how tarbiya transformed the region.

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As Ferguson observes, ‘The story of tarbiya in the Eastern Mediterranean is part of a much larger narrative. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people around the world faced the rise of capitalist societies, progressive temporalities and modern forms of popular sovereignty, constitutionalism and democratic governance as political ideals. These changes are often understood in isolation, but the history of tarbiya shows us a binary regime of sex and gender tied them all together.’

The story of the transformation of tarbiya essentially begins in the 1850s, when east Mediterranean countries began to integrate themselves into the new capitalist global economy and European powers started pushing themselves into the Middle East. A key component that shifted the intellectual landscape was the increasing role Catholic and Protestant missionaries played in these societies. Education was a big part of the missionary project; women and girls were an important target for them, in particular cultivating women to be mothers and child-bearers. ‘Civilisation meant spreading those values that ensured women would provide the moral lessons necessary to regenerate society from within’, was how the missionaries conceived of the goal of female education. Moral, political, economic, social and civilisation progress and development was tied to women’s education to be good mothers, to cultivate and raise good children and, those not educated to do so, would lead to decay of the nation. American doctor and Protestant missionary, Henry De Forest (1814-1858), outlined this view in a lecture in Beirut, where he, ‘contrasted good Protestant mothers to the unschooled Syrian women whose child-bearing practices would lead to moral and civilisational decline’. The pressure to be a good mother whose primary role was in the home was now being tied to civilisational well-being and became a key talking point in the newly emerging Arabic press.

While Arab men were key to further developing the notion, educated Arab women also took up the mantra, too. Ferguson lays out how Arabic female writers and intellectuals debated tarbiya and linked it to other concepts, too. A pioneering figure was Hana Kurani, who hailed from Mount Lebanon and was a graduate of the Beirut Female Seminary, an American Protestant missionary educational institution, and who travelled and lectured in America. She wrote articles in Arabic, published a book on ethics in 1891 and was given an imperial medal by the Ottoman Sultan. ‘Kurani argued for women’s unique role in ordering social life … She held that the best tool for shaping society was subtle work of subject formation through tarbiya, undertaken by women in the home.’ Women were central to society and child-rearing was the key cornerstone. Kurani’s generation began to conceive of the idea of ‘women’s work’ which was unpaid, child-raising and domestic and this was contrasted with ‘men’s work’ that was outside the home. How you raised your child was increasingly scrutinised in the press. An interesting example is breastfeeding; traditionally, women had the option to use a wet nurse to breastfeed their child and this was considered permissible in Islam but, as new ideas about motherhood took hold, not breastfeeding yourself was moralised as a sign of being a bad mother and bad for society.

Labors of Love offers a fresh and interesting perspective on gender and the rise of the modern Arab world. Susanna Ferguson has told a much neglected story that still permeates the Arab world today, but, as she is at pains to point out, is not unique to the Arab world, rather is part of a global story. While the story is intensely local, it is not a tale of exceptionising or exoticising the Arab world or Arab women; the book is nuanced, detailed well-researched and easy to read. Labors of Love is a much needed intervention into the scholarship of Arab intellectual and social history, but it would be of use to scholars who work in other regions of the world and the lay reader will find plenty for them in this book.

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