Afsaneh Najmabadi follows the reconfiguration of education and rights into a central factor of modernist imagination of women and housewives. Najmabadi locates the shift in gender performance in a “double movement” of understanding, one that combines “disciplinary techniques and emancipatory promises” to rethink “gender in the Iranian modernist imagination” (94). By this Najmabadi means that women’s rights and the regulation of practices towards women were based primarily on their potential as mothers and carers for the future of Iran. One of the main points throughout “Crafting an Educated Housewife” in the description of the new emphasis on education for girls and women was the idea that “the progress of the nation was seen as dependent on the progress of women” (102). Thus, this outlook influenced the shift from women being merely part of a household to women becoming the manager of the household. In this process of becoming the managers of the household, the “discourse of domesticity” became an important basis for women’s advancement in Iran. Rather than seeing the emphasis on “scientific housekeeping, child rearing, and husband keeping” as limiting for Iranian women in the early twentieth century, they were seen as the reason why educated women were needed “in order for families to prosper and for the country to become civilized” (109). In this regard, Najmabadi parallels Saba Mahmood’s argument that context is key for understanding which actions constitute agency and freedom for Muslim women. Acknowledging that the emphasis on education for Iranian women was based on a model of exemplary domesticity does not devalue the fact that Iranian women in the early twentieth century were empowered by this shift in their education policies.
As Lila Abu-Lughod has shown previously in her article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” resorting to the cultural is a common method used to give the appearance of trying to understand what Dicle Kogacioglu calls “problematic non-Western practices” (Kogacioglu 119). In the context of honor killings taking place in Turkey, Kogacioglu argues that a recentered analytical framework for analyzing these “traditional practices” should focus on the external powers influencing these occurrences, rather than explaining them through a cultural lens (Kogacioglu 119). So-called modern institutions are framed as different and complete opposite to the “native, timeless and unchanging” traditions, thus making it seem as though these two things are completely separate from one another (121). What is important to the understanding of practices in both Western and non-Western countries is that “every deployment of tradition has its effects in terms of the distribution of power,” and that, in the case of honor killings, these distributions of power will take form through institutional perpetuation of violence” (120). In essence, Kogacioglu is critical of the “tradition effect” which serves to “render invisible the complicity of sate institutions and the juridical apparatus in furthering the conditions that give rise to honor crimes” (129). For example, the juridical procedure uses many contradictions in laws that find ways to reduce and make bearable any punishments for an honor crime, instead of denouncing honor crimes by having strict and applicable punishments (123).
Both Najmabadi and Kogacioglu write around the dichotomous thinking of the world, where there is a strict line between “‘East’ and ‘West,’ ‘Middle East’ and ‘Europe,’ past and present, tradition and modernity” (Kogacioglu 138). These essentialist notions are mostly normalized through international news media, and are permeated with anxiety for the unknown and misunderstood. In many cases, the Western views and practices are posited as the norms and the correct way of thinking about the issues Najmabadi and Kogacioglu talk about.
Works Cited:
Lila Abu-Lughod. 2002. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others. American Anthropologist 104, no. 3: 783-790.
Dicle Koğacıoğlu. 2004. The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey. Signs 15 (2): 118-151.
Saba Mahmood. 2005."The Subject of Freedom" in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Afsaneh Najmabadi. 1998. "Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran" in Re-Making Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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