Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress

GENDERED PARADOXES: EDUCATING JORDANIAN WOMEN IN NATION, FAITH, AND PROGRESS by Fida J. Adely Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 (ix + 228 pages, bibliography, index) $25.00 (paper)In Gendered Paradoxes, Fida J. Adely provides an ethnographically vivid account of the education of young women in a Jordanian high school, capturing the complex interplay between the demands of the state, the discourse on progress and pietism, and the imaginings and agency of the girls and their families. The "gender paradox" at the book's center refers to a World Bank gender assessment released in 2005, which found that though women in Jordan have equal access to all levels of education, high fertility rates and low labor participation were also characteristic. Adely unpacks this alleged paradox in a number of important ways. She put the question of the report's "paradox" to a group of girls in the small Jordanian city she calls Bawadi al-Nasim, where she spent fifteen months of fieldwork in 2005-6. If the World Bank's expectations regarding the outcome of female education were not realized in Jordan, what, she asks, did the young women themselves expect? "How do young women and their families define devel- opment and progress? How do adolescent girls educate each other every day about what is good, pious, or desirable? " (14). She also scrutinizes the role of education. The state relies on education to make desirable citizens but is confronted by a number of counterforces and obstacles, not least of which is the heterogeneous nature of the state actors themselves, whether teachers, administrators, or state officials.Adely's book continues a rich tradition of anthropological scholar- ship in the Middle East that seeks to challenge knowledge that neglects the region's heterogeneity or the subtleties of daily life. In particular, her careful research and analysis redress the stereotype of Arab Muslim women as "oppressed, weak, and passive victims" (12). Following the work of Lila Abu-Lughod on Bedouin women's lives and Saba Mahmood on women and piety in Egypt, Adely complicates assumptions about women in the Middle East and contributes to these literatures by raising questions about gender, youth and education, and development. Her research points "to the possibility that different women might have different needs, desires, values, and expectations" as well as the ways in which "forms of distinction such as class and geography shape and constrain possibilities for women in Jordan as they do for women anywhere" (13). Adely's ethnography, in addition to dozens of interviews with students, includes deep engagement with teachers, including classroom observation. Adely also addresses a paradox of youth and adolescence: The girls of Bawadi al-Nasim are faced with "new restrictions on their mobility and expectations for greater modesty in dress and comportment in public" precisely as new possibilities, such as their first opportunities to forge non-kin relationships and to pursue different educational and career paths, present themselves (23). The school is the central point for Adely to bring these threads together; it is a "critical arena" for analysis, "given the limited access that adolescent girls have to public spaces in which such deliberation may occur" (19). In the first section, which is built around the theme of nationalism, Adely situates the al-Khatwa Secondary School, one of three girls' high schools in Bawadi al-Nasim, within the Hashemite regime's long struggle to establish its legitimacy. This process has played out through the creation of a number of institutions, including schools, as well as the forging of a "supertribe," with the king at its head, intended to guarantee the security of the state (31). This project, of course, met many different kinds of challenges, from the presence of Palestinian refugees since 1948 and Iraqi refugees fleeing the Iraq war since 2003 to the ideological pressures brought by Islamic political groups like the Islamic Action Front. …