Of Wife and the Domestic Servant in the Arab World

My goal in this short essay is to capture for the reader the gains and losses associated with Islamic-based family rules in the context of an economy that has a generous supply of cheap domestic workers and a sparing one of female public employment. I do so from the perspective of the housewife who is able to hire a domestic servant. I specifically argue that a spill-over effect of family law rules occurs in a household that employs domestic servants, triangulating the relationship between husband, wife, and servant. On the one hand, rules of the family are as formative of the domestic servant’s life as rules of labor, while at the same time, the presence of domestic labor modifies upwards and downwards the impact of family rules on the relationship between husband and wife.

While in western states, the availability of cheap domestic work is considered a supplement, and an important one at that, to female paid employment, this wisdom does not seem to hold true in the Arab world. Female employment in the region is one of the lowest in the world, averaging at no more than twenty-six percent of the labor force and mostly concentrated in the public sector, itself undergoing shrinkage as a result of privatization. The majority of women among the poor work in the informal economy, which includes domestic work.[1] The supply of local domestic workers is compounded by an even bigger supply of very cheap foreign domestic workers hailing from various Asian and African countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Ethiopia, and the Ivory Coast. The wages of such servants are so low that a good one seventh of all households in the Arab world employ either a local or a foreign domestic worker.[2] Even for those who could not afford them, hiring a domestic servant is something to aspire to as one would rise in the world. In short, a large number of Arab housewives find themselves in the (enviable?) position of having cheap maids with nowhere else to go for paid employment.

I should identify, though, four common misunderstandings on the relevance of sharia to modern family law and women in the Arab world. First, shari`a’s relevance to the lives of women in the modern Arab world has been largely confined to the area of family law. Second, in the modern nation state, shari’a has been codified, i.e., certain rules derived from Islamic jurisprudence on the family have been selected and passed as laws, each nation state having its own unique combination of such rules. Third, the courts and the judges who adjudicate disputes on family law are either secular courts/judges, or judges trained in state-run judiciary institutions with specific instruction on the state-based modern understanding of what shari’a is. Fourth, the code, rather than Qur`an, the prophetic traditions, or the school of Islamic jurisprudence, is the primary source of the law. The latter constitute secondary sources.

The Household Not Woman

Instead of using the category “woman” as the primary unit of analysis, I will use that of the “household.” I do so for two reasons: First, the household is the primary place in which the category “woman” starts to break down into several women competing for power and resources, dislodging the feminist political desire for a unified category that is the bearer of a political program for “women’s empowerment” in confrontation with men. This occurs through the figure of the “domestic servant.” who triangulates the wife’s relationship with the husband inside the domestic household. Introducing the “domestic servant” into the discussion of the “legal status of women in the Arab World” (mediated through the category of the “household”) allows me to construct my narrative in a specific manner. First, I take the figure of “women in the Arab World” seriously without privileging nationalism or culture, i.e. subverting the common practice of discussing the wife’s (Arab) legal status without including that of her domestic servant (often non-Arab: Sri Lankan, Philippina, Indonesian, etc...). Second, I stress that including the domestic servant in the analytics of gender in the Arab World allows us to better understand the plight of the wife under family law. This is so because the wife partially transfers to the servant the legal duty of “obedience” to her husband and at the same time shares with the servant the benefit of spousal support by the husband (the servant’s wages). Third, I marshal contract law into the discussion the legal status of the domestic servant who while sharing the costs and benefits of family law is not governed by it, but whose own entry into the household is mediated by a specific rule structure, mainly. Contract law (the contract of employment), as well as state regulatory regimes (of her country of origin as well as that of the country where she temporarily resides to work) are essential elements of this experience. If we put the servant’s contract of employment (written in the case of foreign workers, or in the case of local ones) as well as the various regulations that touch on her labor back inside the household, we end up with the law of the “household” instead of family law, in effect, reverting to a medieval legal norm of categorizing the “private.” This is as it should be, for this allows us to capture better, given the very low rate of female public employment in the Arab world, the legal status of women in the Arab world as primarily a question of female domestic labor and the ways in which this labor is commodified, exchanged, and circulated.

Second, the category “household” is a subcategory of the larger economic mode, which in turn could be seen as a macro household, interacting with the familial one dynamically with reciprocal feedback from each, and is therefore in my view more appropriate analytically in situating women legally. For instance, a windfall of gain (rent) on the macroeconomic level accrues to Gulf Arab states from selling oil in the international market. This then circulates in the rest of the Arab world in the form of remittances from export labor to the oil producing countries and oil wealth-based investment capital in the non-oil producing countries. If we take the marriage contract as one of the founding acts of the domestic household, then it is hard to ignore the fact that the “price of marriage” has increased exponentially over the years in the Arab world as a reflection of general economic trends. The price attached to a woman’s dowry[3], her expectation of the husband`s income, its prospective stability and security, the assets that the husband brings into the household such as furnishings, have become inflated over time as a result of the circulation of oil wealth in the Arab World. If we compare that to the incredibly low wages given to domestic servants and their stability over time, we cannot help but conclude that a windfall of “surplus labor” accrues to the household, primarily the wife, from the domestic servant. In other words, while the wife’s “price” has increased as a reflection of the generalization of oil wealth, that of the servant has remained steadily low as a reflection of the depressed economies from which these servants hail and the nature of international labor relations that ensues. 

There Is Also Sex

The household is not just the site of labor circulation/commodification but also sex. Before sex enters the household to be captured by family law, it is already circulating as an effect of the distributive work of criminal law rules (on crimes of honor/passion,[4] adultery,[5] abortion[6]) constricting and distributing sex and sexualities in a particular form so that they arrive at the date of the marriage contract ready to be commodified. Two rules in family law bring about this effect, both of which have to be contended with if our picture of the household is to be made complete: the rule on dowry and the rule on obedience. The rule that captures sex at the date of the contract is that of dowry: “the man is under the legal obligation to pay dowry to the woman at the date of contract”. While criminal rules ensure the penalization of pre-marital sex for women (and less so for men), family law allows women to bargain their socially and legally enforced virginity in the form of dowry. Dowry is the commodified expression of women’s pre-marital virginity payable at the initiation of marriage.

The rule in family law that commodifies sex during marriage is the wife’s legal duty to her husband to be sexually available to him.[7] In return, she earns her right to spousal support.[8] It is not clear how much of that circulates “down” to the domestic servant. While incidents of rape and sexual abuse of domestic servants by husbands are reported by human rights agencies as well as by anecdotal accounts, it is not clear how prevalent these practices are.

A Short History of Dowry

There is a history to the way the dowry became commodified in the Arab world (with consequences for wife’s maintenance). In village economies, before the petro-dollar swept the village with its luring promises of consumption, a dowry given to a woman was often an asset valued by village life (a goat or two, a piece of land, etc.). These were assets that were productive of more assets in the village economy. Women worked on their dowry/land, husbanded their dowry/animals, and reaped the profit they yielded, which was legally their own. This had a spillover effect on wife’s maintenance as an obligation of the husband, in return for which he had sexual access to the wife. It lessened greatly the stakes for women associated with such financial support because women were productive agents with income of their own.

The cash economy of the petro-dollar changed all that. The daughters of these women moved to the city to inhabit a middle class apartment as “housewives” (or the city moved to the village). A dowry paid in cash, furnishings, and jewelry lubricated their entry into the urban, insular, often jobless, middle class existence. The new urban middle class wife typically deferred the cash part of her dowry to be payable upon divorce as a form of security, settling for furnishings and jewelry payable upfront. Islamic family law gave the husband the right to no-fault divorce while limiting the woman’s right to grounds-based divorce.[9] Upon divorce a woman was entitled to a limited amount of financial support/reimbursement. Deferred dowry, always in cash, would come in handy under such circumstances.

The move to cash dowry, mostly deferred as security, raised exponentially the stakes associated with wife’s maintenance and consequently. those associated with sexual availability, making the overall pull of obedience that much stronger in order to survive. Turning cash and jewelry into “productive” assets through investment in the urban economy would require overcoming the wall that separated the urban household from the urban economy, specialized skills that the new urban housewife in her insular life seemed unqualified for (without the assistance of her husband, that is). The rule in family law that conditioned a wife’s work outside the house on husband’s permission had a prohibitive effect.[10]

The paradox is that while wife “price” may have become inflated as a result of the petro-dollar economy, the wife’s bargaining power in relation to her husband decreased because of the erosion of the productive quality of the assets that she brought to the household. Indeed, the inflation of the “price” of marriage produced a prohibitive effect on the event of marriage itself: fewer and fewer men could afford to enter into marriage, producing the much-discussed phenomenon in the Arab World: the single woman in her thirties ready and willing to be married with no men available to make the right bid for her asking price for marriage. This new single woman (“spinster”) lives in the vortex of the newly “priced” rules: single, in her thirties, and a virgin (may or may not be employed).

Where Labor and Sex Meet

The obedience rule is where labor and sex meet.[11] The introduction of the petro-dollar economy, as we have seen, increased the pull of sexual obedience for the wife as a consequence of her increased financial dependence on her husband, itself a function of the erosion of the productivity of the assets she brought into the marriage. On the other hand, it reaped her windfall of labor, the result of the depressed value of the servant’s wages and exclusion from labor regulations, that left her at the mercy of the familial demands throughout her waking hours. One would imagine that at least in the latter case, the wife would feel “freed” from the obedience leg of performing domestic labor. In fact, quite the opposite occurred. First, the transfer of the performance of domestic labor to a lowly paid domestic servant paid for by the husband intensified the husband’s expectation of such performance whose management was delegated to the wife; performed by the servant, it remained the responsibility of the wife. Second, what could have been cause for gender friction if the wife had performed it (the wife demanding that the husband assist her with household chores in an attempt to improve her position in the household) was converted into class friction in which they were both allied against the servant. In other words, the formal articulation of wifely duty remained the same because it was never politicized in the form of the “battle of the sexes." Third, the definition of what constitutes wifely duties may have even taken a stricter turn (as more is expected of the wife). This is so because the wife’s performance of domestic work is priced higher than that performed by the domestic servant, given the comparative rule structure that govern their respective lives giving wives higher bargaining power vis-à-vis the husband. The tightly reciprocal articulation of the wifely duties and rights in marriage (obedience for financial support, deferred dowry for divorce), combined with the wife’s capacity to mobilize the forces of familial pressure to improve her position in the household, are not available for the domestic servant, given her heightened insular status and the extreme terms of her contract. This led to the redefinition socially of what constituted domestic work with spillover effect on the definition of wifely duties. More was now socially expected of the wife given the “cheapness” with which the work could be transferred to the servant. Perversely enough, the wife’s class power came to imprison her further in her gender trap. Fourth, the presence of cheap domestic service maintained/increased social expectations of social norms expected of both genders (hospitality) which would have otherwise eroded or been greatly compromised had cheap domestic labor not been available and gender friction arose as a result. Moreover, if women were inclined to help other women perform domestic labor in social gatherings (as a form of gender solidarity), they were far less inclined to do so when a servant was performing those chores (an effect of class friction). The total burden ended up being intensified in the servant, with the wife as her close manager responsible for her performance.  Given the above, even though the wife and the servant were formally separated by different rule networks applying to each producing differential bargaining powers (family law for the wife, employment contract for the servant), a rule spillover effect was taking place with the duty of “obedience” (to the husband) being now that of the servant (to the husband and wife) and the “obedience” of the servant (to the husband and wife) as a total sum of the servant’s terms of employment being that of the wife (to the husband). In other words, the servant had become a split-off fragment of the wife and the wife a split-off fragment of the servant. Needless to say, the more exacting weight of class friction relative to the weight of gender friction, which gives the wife a much higher bargaining power in relation to the servant, tips the overall burden of obedience in favor of the wife at the expense of the servant, and in favor of the husband at the expense of wife and servant.

Exit

Unlike the wife, the domestic servant exited the system once her contract of employment terminated. She exited the spouse’s “marriage” with assets (her wages) which if carefully administered would earn her bargaining power in the marriage she would rejoin or enter into back home. At the end of her servant’s employment, the wife may have practiced a great deal of class power over her servant, but her labor of management and as stand-in for servant in case of emergencies remained unrewarded. Whatever work the wife did was in return for her food and upkeep; all of which the servant was entitled to plus her wages.