Waithood

Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing

Marcia C. Inhorn, Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Marcia C. Inhorn, Nancy J. Smith-Hefner

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789209006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of "Waithood" was developed by political scientist Diane Singerman to describe the expanding period of time between adolescence and full adulthood as young people wait to secure steady employment and marry. The contributors to this volume employ the waithood concept as a frame for richly detailed ethnographic studies of "youth in waiting" from a variety of world areas, including the Middle East Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S, revealing that whether voluntary or involuntary, the phenomenon of youth waithood necessitates a recognition of new gender and family roles.

Part I

WAITHOOD, STATEHOOD, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DIGNITY

Chapter 1

YOUTH, ECONOMICS, AND THE POLITICS OF WAITHOOD

THE STRUGGLE FOR DIGNITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Diane Singerman

“It’s not a new Egypt until I have enough money to get married,” said Ahmed Gamal in 2013, laughing with friends who have started placing bets on who will be the first among them to tie the knot. “It’s a country of boys waiting to be men.”

—Ahmed Gamal, quoted in Laura Bohn, “Egypt’s Marriage Crisis,” 2013

Introduction

Research observations typically pile up on top of each other, often raising more questions than they answer. Studying one issue may make another appear more intriguing or puzzling. I distinctly remember one of those moments while living in Cairo in 1985. While discussing the upcoming marriage of one of her daughters, the matriarch of the family with whom I was living began to pull bags of drinking glasses, pots, fabric, pajamas, plates, and other household goods from a small storage space above their bathroom. Widowed at an early age, the mother of seven children had been saving every gift and exploiting every sale for the gihāz, or trousseau, of her five daughters, despite limited resources. Although previously unaware of their stored treasures, I knew they were careful about each piaster. Soon, I learned that the struggle to marry off one’s children and provide the requisite economic resources was a challenge in household after household, in every city and village in Egypt, across economic and social strata. It remains a challenge today.

Why did this virtual storehouse of household goods saved over decades leave such an impression on me as I studied how women and men negotiate authoritarianism in Egypt (Singerman 1995)? The extent of the financial resources needed to marry was—and is—almost unbelievable, considering the low wages and economic challenges of this community. Within policy and academic circles however, few paid attention to the costs of marriage even though its institutional structure influenced a range of other decisions and goals such as education, employment, migration, savings and investment, social networks, sensitive and highly surveilled norms around intimacy and sexuality, and family cohesion. In addition to the formidable costs of marriage, other key phenomena were adding to obstacles facing the younger generation, such as finding partners and intimacy, marrying, securing jobs, and thus attaining adult status within larger society. A project on youth exclusion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by the Wolfensohn Center for Development at the Brookings Institution led to several publications and rich comparative discussions (Dhillon and Yousef 2009; Singerman 2007), at which point I introduced the term “waithood” in my contribution to the project.

While little data about the cost of marriage existed at the time, more voices were concerned about the growing youth bulge in the region, with large numbers of young people flooding the job market. Due to the nuptiality transition and improvements in health care and female education, the region had one of the largest youth bulges in the world. A youth bulge, demographers argue, can be positive as dynamic young people contribute to their economy and society, with fewer dependent older cohorts “dragging” on the economy. Yet, if young people are unemployed and unfulfilled with few institutions to channel their demands and participation, countries may waste their demographic dividend and experience political volatility.

This complex set of circumstances led to my argument that young people were not following the typical path between a long childhood and shorter adolescence to reach adulthood, but that they were stuck in “waithood” or the long, liminal, period between adolescence and adulthood. Adolescence is associated largely with the teenage years of ten to nineteen, with adulthood typically following, but in MENA adulthood is associated with marriage, rather than one’s age or living independently from one’s family. Furthermore, due to prevailing (although always changing) social norms influenced by religious values and law, sexuality is housed in marriage and dating among unmarried young people often provoked social anxiety and scandals typically reflected in the press and public realm. While the idea of waithood emerged to describe the predicaments of young people in Egypt due to ethnographic and quantitative research centered there, many of these same trends characterize other MENA countries.

The first part of this chapter explores contemporary dimensions of waithood largely centered on three countries—Tunisia, Jordan, and Egypt—since important new data have been collected and analyzed about these countries. The second half of the chapter presents an argument that links the social and economic predicaments of waithood to political contestation and protest in MENA countries ranging from Morocco in the west to Saudi Arabia in the east. More specifically, young people are engaging in a politics of waithood as they demand dignity and an end to economic and political marginalization. The financial and social challenges of waithood and its liminal status have fueled these political demands. Waithood’s connection to political contestation took a more obvious turn during the Arab Spring. I have argued elsewhere that young people’s particular grievances and circumstances fueled their protests for regime change, dignity, and social justice (Singerman 2013). Waithood was no longer waiting as young people occupied the squares and lit up social media to condemn authoritarian and monarchical rule, torture, political violence, corruption, and arbitrary power. Some scholars disagree with the notion that the Arab Spring was a youth revolution, since people of all ages and from many constituencies joined the protests, including members of trade unions, Islamist movements, civil society organizations, and human rights groups. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that youth, among them students, were an overrepresented cohort among the protesters across the region, and many women were central to the protests as well.

The call for dignity—or karāma—implied that indignity had prevailed for many decades under the old regimes and that young people refused to be the victims of harassment, state abuse, and violence any longer. Social movement “master frames” diagnose a problem in need of redress, offer solutions to the problem, and motivate support for collective action (Snow and Benford 1988). Young women, fighting for dignity and autonomy of the body, demanded new laws, new policies, and further freedom. Many have noted what they see as the failure of the Arab Spring: Egypt returned to a more oppressive, patriarchal, and exclusionary military rule; Syria, Yemen, and Libya disintegrated into civil war; and monarchies such as Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain weathered the storm. Yet, I argue that we can see a more positive legacy of the Arab Spring in the sustained and at times successful demands for dignity, particularly as they relate to gender equality. Young women and men who demanded dignity continue to engage in public contestation and to support controversial initiatives and movements that have produced policies to enhance women’s rights and gender justice, deepen constitutional commitments to equality, and foster greater diversity and new patterns of intimacy and sexual identity (Tadros 2016). Viewing a set of issues in conversation with each other, rather than as discrete, separate variables may minimize the complexity of these issues or possibly exaggerate positive developments since the Arab Spring, but it is important to understand why many young people are still reimagining their future, rejecting the status quo, contesting powerful interests, and renegotiating norms as they continue to struggle with the consequences of waithood.

Methodology

This chapter is based on ethnographic research launched in older areas of Cairo in the mid-1980s and 1990s that was complemented by additional interviews and research in the 2000s about youth, marriage costs, social norms, public policy, and related issues. As mentioned earlier, the influence of savings strategies around marriage is well-known in Egypt, but not integrated into reigning economic analyses of Egyptian political economy—or into research about gender. Aggregating data from a wider and deeper cross section of Egyptian families, and building on ethnographic insights, Barbara Ibrahim and I collaborated with generous colleagues and added a small marriage module to an Egyptian national household expenditure survey about food subsidies that the International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted with the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Trade and Supply in 1999 (Singerman and Ibrahim 2003). Although it included only four hundred households, gathering and analyzing the first quantitative data on national marriage costs led to a broader interdisciplinary conversation about these issues. The survey’s data on poverty and consumption allowed for a comparative sense of the financial challenges associated with marriage and the size of what we called the “marriage imperative.” There is now far richer scholarship and data on marriage costs after the inclusion of a revised “marriage module” from the 1999 study in gender-sensitive national labor force surveys in Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan over the last two decades. Professors Ragui Assaad and Caroline Krafft are pioneers in analyzing connections between the labor market, the marriage market, and male and female employment. This chapter draws from this research published by a range of economists and sociologists, coordinated by national statistical agencies and the Economic Research Forum.¹ In addition, further primary and secondary sources were consulted since the Arab Spring erupted in MENA to support arguments about the “politics of waithood” and the demand for dignity articulated by so many young people in and since 2011.

The Components of Waithood

The Costs of Marriage

Understanding the experience of waithood necessitates linking the cost of marriage to other phenomena confronting young people in Egypt. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, scholars and policymakers rarely studied the cost of marriage; yet ignoring this protracted financial savings campaign distorts young people’s priorities, the goal posts of their decision-making, the trajectory of their employment paths, as well as the economic strategies of their parents. If a young man and woman and their families cannot accumulate the expected sums, a marriage may be postponed for many years, an engagement broken, or financial and social expectations scaled back. As Krafft and Assaad (2017: 2) argue, “marriage is the sole socially acceptable route to a number of adult roles, including independent living, socially sanctioned sexual relations, and childbearing,” and all parties involved hope to enact the best possible outcome.

I knew from my own ethnographic work in Egypt and through other scholarship that religious, social, legal, and customary norms dictated specific costs that the bride, the groom, the bride’s family, and the groom’s family are to provide (Hoodfar 1997; Singerman 1995). The six main marital expenses include: housing (typically an apartment, or rooms in the groom’s family’s apartment if living with relatives provided by the groom and his family); furniture and appliances (split between the bride and groom’s family, designated for particular items and related to the value of the mahr or prompt dower); wedding celebrations (often multiple celebrations for different stages of the engagement and marriage often paid for by both families); jewelry for the bride (shabka largely paid for by the groom and his family); a dower (mahr or sum given by the groom to the bride registered in the marriage contract); and the gihāz, or preparations for marriage in colloquial Egyptian, which includes smaller items such as kitchen supplies, carpets, linens, and clothes for the bride (largely paid for by the bride’s family and the bride).²

Scholars continue to suggest that marriage costs are extremely challenging across economic and regional groups within countries, and across MENA. Assaad and Krafft (2014: 8) argue they are “the most substantial investment young North Africans make.” I argue elsewhere that it is the most important intergenerational exchange of assets, particularly for women, since Muslim inheritance laws offer female heirs only half of what male heirs of a similar relationship to the deceased will receive (Singerman 2007). Often, women do not even obtain their rightful legal inheritance due to family pressures to keep wealth concentrated in fewer, male hands (Hoodfar 1997).

Krafft and Assaad (2017: 2) confirm earlier arguments that young women can be demanding, since they realize their financial negotiations will impact their future power within the marriage, as well as the economic well-being and social status of their future family. Marriage is therefore a high-risk endeavor, and the bride’s side tries to secure at the outset as much certainty about the spouse as possible and the most advantageous living conditions.

Recent data from labor force surveys increase our understanding and knowledge of marriage costs, and quantitative analysis and economic theorizing about marriage markets and hazard models help us understand the interplay between individual and family characteristics (education, employment, income, assets, housing type, consanguinity, region, etc.) and marriage costs. Recent analysis suggests that marriage costs remain formidable and challenging, across the board, even if they have declined in real terms in some countries, such as Jordan (Assaad and Krafft 2014: 9; Salem 2012; Sieverding, Berri, and Abdulrahim 2018).

To understand these costs more specifically, the first 1999 small household expenditure survey, which included detailed questions about the cost of marriage (COM) in Egypt, found that the COM were EGP 20,194 (approximately US $6,000 in 1999). Comparing these costs to household expenditures in the sample, the cost of marriage equaled eleven times annual household expenditures per capita (or the market value of all goods and services, including durable products purchased by a household [excluding one’s home]) or four and a half times per capita Gross National Product. The marriage burden was particularly challenging for those rural households living below the poverty line: their marriage costs were fifteen times per capita household expenditures (Singerman 2007; Singerman and Ibrahim 2003).

In the much larger Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) in 2006, which included more than 8,000 households, marriage costs had risen to approximately EGP 36,789 or US $6,400 (Singerman 2007). Even though marriage costs have declined over time when adjusted for inflation, people’s perceptions of marriage costs may be related to the prices of other goods and services and their memories of less expensive, and less consumptive, wedding preparations.

In a more recent analysis of marriage costs from the 2012 ELMPS, Assaad and Krafft (2014: 9) found that total costs for marriages (based on the preceding three years) were around EGP 62,000, or approximately US $10,164. We will have to wait for the next round of the ELMPS to see how marriage costs have evolved, as Egypt experienced economic difficulties and inflation after the Arab Spring. One indicator that the financial burdens of marriage remain challenging is that Atta Selim, a member of the Egyptian Parliament’s Legislative Committee, proposed a new “Fund to Finance Marriages of Young Men” that will provide an interest-free, tax-free loan of EGP 60,000 to Egyptian men. The new legislation was approved by the Parliament’s Committee of Youth and Sport and endorsed by seventy other Members of Parliament. An article describing the new loan uses the pejorative ‘ānis, or “spinsters,” and argues that this law will help older, unmarried women because men who marry older Egyptian women will receive priority for these new loans, as will men with lower incomes (Abdel Khalil 2018; Amin 2018; “MP Submits Draft Law” 2018).

Relying on the 2006 ELMPS, Figure 1.1 portrays how long it would take the groom and the groom’s father to save for marriage costs, since the survey also includes detailed earnings data. It offers three sets of calculations: if the groom and the groom’s father saved 100 percent of their income, 50 percent of their income, and finally 17.1 percent of their income, which was the official Egyptian gross domestic savings rate at the time (World Bank 2019a). Because it seems impossible to save 100 percent, or even 50 percent, of one’s income, this exercise demonstrates the formidable and lengthy savings strategies of Egyptian famili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Waithood: Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing
• Part I. Waithood, Statehood, and the Struggle for Dignity
• Part II. Gender, Education, and the Aspiration for Autonomy
• Part III. Delayed Marriage and the Meanings of Singlehood
• Part IV. Delayed Childbearing and the Quest for Motherhood
• Conclusion. Waithood in the Twenty-First Century
• Index