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New Arab Maids: Female Domestic Work, “New Arab Women,” and National Memory in British Mandate Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2020

Caroline Kahlenberg Open the ORCID record for Caroline Kahlenberg [Opens in a new window]
Caroline Kahlenberg*
Affiliation:
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 38 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
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*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The “new Arab woman” of the early 20th century has received much recent scholarly attention. According to the middle- and upper-class ideal, this woman was expected to strengthen the nation by efficiently managing her household, educating her children, and contributing to social causes. Yet, we cannot fully understand the “new Arab woman” without studying the domestic workers who allowed this class to exist. Domestic workers carried out much of the physical labor that let their mistresses pursue new standards of domesticity, social engagement, and participation in nationalist organizations. This article examines relationships between Arab housewives and female domestic workers in British Mandate Palestine (1920–1948) through an analysis of domestic reform articles and memoirs. Arab domestic reformers argued that elite housewives, in order to become truly modern women, had to treat maids with greater respect and adjust to the major socioeconomic changes that peasants were experiencing, yet still maintain a clear hierarchy in the home. Palestinian memoirists, meanwhile, often imagine their pre-1948 homes as a site of Palestinian national solidarity. Their memories of intimate relationships that developed between elite families and peasant maids have crucially shaped nationalist narratives that celebrate the Palestinian peasantry.

Keywords

Arab womenBritish Mandate Palestinedomestic work
Type
Article
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 449 - 467
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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25 Here I follow the approach of Banerjee, “Down Memory Lane,” 683. I cannot know how the experiences of domestic workers might “speak back” to the archive of elite figures presented here. As Stoler and Strassler write, scholars often assume that domestic service typified the subaltern condition, and they make assumptions about the home and domestic work as a site of “intimate humiliation, contempt and disdain” in which “subaltern power accrues.” But in their research on the memories of Indonesian domestic servants in Dutch colonial homes, Stoler and Strassler found that the former servants’ testimony did not contain the affect expressed in colonial memoirs or assumed in scholarly works. As they write: “Accounts of former house servants often speak past, rather than back to, the colonial archive and the nostalgic memories of their Dutch employers.” See “Castings for the Colonial,” 11.

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33 Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 489–90.

34 Ibid., 493.

35 Seikaly, Men of Capital, 58.

36 Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 490. For example, on the role of the American University of Beirut in educating Arab civil servants in the British and French Mandates, see Kalisman, Hilary Falb, “Bursary Scholars at the American University of Beirut: Living and Practising Arab Unity,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 4 (2015): 599–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Examples include Qasim Amin, Butrus al-Bustani, and Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi. Greenberg, Ela, Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow: Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 2Google Scholar.

38 Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 494, 497.

39 Ibid., 497. See Seikaly (Men of Capital, 58) on the importance of “Eastern” values in Palestinian consumption. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib shows how the Arab middle class in Beirut attempted to distinguish itself from both the wealthier classes and the ifranji, or European, culture; “Taste and Class in Late Ottoman Beirut,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 3 (2011): 475–92, quote on 476.

40 Seikaly, Men of Capital, 55. As Abou-Hodeib argues, the criticism of wealthier classes by Arab intellectuals contrasts with Pierre Bourdieu's conception of “downward self-demarcation,” in which the working class functions as the “negative reference point”; “Taste and Class,” 481.

41 Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 476.

42 Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 490–92. On the “New City” versus the “Old City” of Jerusalem in mandatory Palestine, see Davis, Rochelle, “Growing Up Palestinian in Jerusalem before 1948: Childhood Memories of Communal Life, Education, and Political Awareness,” in Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation 1917–Present, ed. Jayyusi, Lena (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2015), 187–210Google Scholar.

43 On the “new” woman's duties in the home, see Mona Russell, “Modernity, National Identity, and Consumerism: Visions of the Egyptian Home, 1805–1922,” in Shechter, Transitions in Domestic Consumption 43. Notably, some articles in women's journals also questioned and criticized the public-private dichotomy and the “cult of domesticity.” See Khater, Inventing Home, 16.

44 “Al Sama’ al-Ula,” pt. 1, al-Hasna’, June 1910, 12, cited in Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 479.

45 Seikaly, Men of Capital, 53.

46 On this paradox, see Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 8.

47 Quoted in Seikaly, Men of Capital, 57 (emphasis added).

48 For a list of women's magazines published in the first decade of the 20th century, see Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 294–95, and Khater, Inventing Home, 224n88.

49 Al-Bayt al-‘Arabi al-Jadid can also be translated as “The new Arab house.” Andrea Stanton argues that the publication of Sa‘id's program in Filastin was part of a conscious plan to promote a “modern, progressive, urban, and bourgeois identity for Arab Palestine”; “This Is Jerusalem Calling”: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), 142.

50 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 91–94.

51 Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 489n17. See also Jiha, Michel, Julia Tu'ma Dimashqiyya (Beirut: Riad al-Rayyes Books, 2003)Google Scholar; and Abou-Hodeib, Taste for Home, 115–17.

52 Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 121.

53 For instance, “Marriage in China,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 1, no. 4 (1921): 112; “The Syrian Family,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 1, no. 5 (1921): 143; “The Turkish Woman,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 1, no. 5 (1921): 194; “The New Woman in the New Europe,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 3 (1922): 78; “The Woman in Japan,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 126; and “The Women's Awakening in Brazil,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 5 (1922): 155.

54 Stanton, “Jerusalem Calling,” 143.

55 Filastin, 26 January 1941, quoted in Seikaly, Men of Capital, 62.

56 As Stanton notes, Sa‘id's imagined audience had to be able to afford a radio to tune into her show; “Jerusalem Calling,” 145.

57 Shahid, Serene Husseini, Jerusalem Memories (Beirut: Naufal, 2000), 48–53Google Scholar.

58 Sakakini, Hala, Jerusalem and I: A Personal Record, 2nd ed. (Amman: n.p., 1990), 34Google Scholar.

59 Filastin, 9 March 1941, 1.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 “Al-Bayt,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

63 Ibid.

64 With regard to the salary problem, Sa‘id advised cooperating with the “foreigners,” especially the British, to designate an agreed-upon salary for each service requested. She also suggested that articles be written on this subject in British newspapers; Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2. On Arab domestic workers in British homes, see Sherman, A. J., Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 56–58Google Scholar.

65 Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

66 Ibid.

67 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 5 (1925): 211.

68 Ibid. The use of “kingdom” here is noteworthy: it assumes that the housewife, as the “queen” of this kingdom, is a fair yet still absolute ruler. The reformers gave housewives very detailed instructions. For example, if a servant died and left behind a poor family, the housewife was to give the family a full month's salary; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165, and al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 7 (1925): 293–94. If the mistress wanted to fire a servant, she must notify the servant a full month ahead of time; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

69 Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

70 A-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

71 Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

72 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

73 Brokerage houses, the article stated, had become centers for “traders of the white slave”; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 7 (1925): 293–94.

74 Ibid. It was advised that the uniforms of servants be “simple and clean”; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

75 The housewife could ask about the maid's family, her health, and where she had worked previously; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 7 (1925): 293–94. On the specific duties of servants, see al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 9 (1925): 379–80.

76 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

77 Ibid.

78 Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2. Housewives were advised to remember their maids’ humanity, always use polite language, and give small rewards for jobs well done. See al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

79 Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

80 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

81 Ibid.

82 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

83 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

84 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

85 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 10 (1925): 431–32.

86 Filastin, 9 March 1941, 1, 3. Sa‘id was, according to Seikaly (Men of Capital, 62), “a relentless Anglophile” who praised English conduct and taste. Scholars have noted the influence of European and American domestic ideals on Arab middle-class ideals. See, for example, Khater, Inventing Home, and Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, ch. 2.

87 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

88 Ibid. Frank Crane was an American Presbyterian minister who published articles on life advice, ethics, and women's roles. See, for example, Four Minute Essays (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1919). On the topic of the translation and introduction of Western domestic reform literature into other languages and cultures, see LaCouture, Elizabeth, “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1278–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid. Similar points are made in Filastin, 23 March 1941, 2; and al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 5 (1925): 211.

92 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

93 The emphasis on maintaining this boundary was perhaps heightened by the fact that many in the new middle class had not had a family history of servant keeping. See Todd, “Domestic Service,” 193.

94 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

95 Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

96 Seikaly, Men of Capital, 55.

97 “Al-Mar'a al-Jadida,” al-Akhlaq, 1 February 1933, 40–43. There is a flawed assumption, as Sibylle Meyer notes, that European middle-class women left all of the domestic work to maids and servants. So too was the case with Arab middle-class women. In reality, as Meyer writes, “keeping up bourgeois appearances forced the invisibility of housework. Making this work invisible became in itself work.” See “The Tiresome Work of Conspicuous Leisure: On the Domestic Duties of the Wives of Civil Servants in the German Empire (1871–1918),” in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 164.

98 Omnia El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 126–70.

99 Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim, Surakh fi Layl Tawil (Baghdad: Matba‘at al-‘Ani, 1955), 26Google Scholar. The translations used here are found in William Tamplin, trans., Cry in a Long Night (forthcoming).

100 Ibid., 11–12.

101 Ibid., 37.

102 Roxane also seeks to become a “new woman” by marrying Amin. The phrase “new woman” is used in the text. Ibid., 85–86.

103 Banerjee, “Down Memory Lane,” 688.

104 Ibid., 694. See also Banerjee, Swapna, Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

105 Stoler and Strassler, “Castings for the Colonial,” 9.

106 For a historian who uses memoirs as primary sources, see Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an example of works that interrogate Palestinian memory, see Slyomovics, Susan, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestine Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On the interrogation of Palestinian memory and the home, see Naili, Falestin, “Memories of Home and Stories of Displacement: The Women of Artas and the ‘Peasant Past,’” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 4 (2009): 63–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Saad, Dima, “Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile,” Jerusalem Quarterly 80 (2019): 57–71Google Scholar.

107 DeYoung, Terri, “The Disguises of the Mind: Recent Palestinian Memoirs,” Review of Middle East Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 7.

108 Ibid., 8.

109 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 194.

110 Hamlett, Jane, “‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910,” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 576–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 580. As Falestin Naili writes regarding Palestinian female refugees from the village of Artas now living in eastern Amman, “Physical displacement . . . tends to hide temporal displacement, and often what is longed for is not only the homeland but also the time of one's childhood and youth”; “Memories of Home and Stories of Displacement,” 72.

111 On Khalil Sakakini, see Bawalsa, Nadim, “Sakakini Defrocked,” Jerusalem Quarterly 42 (2010): 5–25Google Scholar.

112 Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 61.

113 Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 477. See also Abou-Hodeib, Toufoul, “The Material Life of the Ottoman Middle Class,” History Compass 10, no. 8 (2012): 584–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 9.

115 Some Jews saw hiring Palestinian Arab domestic workers as a potential mode of Jewish-Arab cooperation. Gerda Arlosoroff-Goldberg wrote that Arab maids in Jewish homes would “broaden the horizons” of Arab maids and in turn, if the Arab maids learned European manners, more understanding could be established between “one woman and another”; “Comments to the ‘Palestinian’ Women's Movement,” Ha-Isha 2 (1929), cited in Segev, Tom, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 216Google Scholar. In other cases, however, Zionist labor organizations heavily policed the presence of Palestinian Arab domestic workers in Jewish homes, as one letter to the editor in the Hebrew newspaper Davar highlights. The writer, a Jewish woman who employed two Arab domestic workers in her home, condemned the audacity of two Jewish women from the Zionist Council of Women Workers (moetzet ha-poelot) who came to her house accusing her of, and scolding her for, hiring Arab maids. The women's aim was to “protect” the Hebrew economy (Davar, 14 September 1936). On Jewish domestic workers in Palestine, see Bernstein, Deborah S., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 235–56Google Scholar.

116 Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 61.

117 Ibid., 31.

118 I am grateful to the IJMES anonymous reviewer for making this point.

119 Salem, Salwa (with Maritano, Laura), The Wind in My Hair, trans. Freccero, Yvonne (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2007)Google Scholar.

120 Ibid., 9.

121 The English translation of The Wind in My Hair spells this name as “Fatma.” It is interesting to note that many of the maids mentioned in these memoirs were named “Fatma” or “Fatima.” In the North African colonial context, “Fatma” became a derogatory, generic name used by French colonists for Arab maids. There is no clear indication, however, that the authors cited in this article are using pseudonyms or that the real names of the domestic workers were anything other than the names provided by the authors. See Salhi, Zahia Smail, “Algerian Women as Agents of Change and Social Cohesion,” in Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change, ed. Sadiqi, Fatima and Ennaji, Moha (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 151Google Scholar.

122 Salem, Wind in My Hair, 11.

123 Ibid.

124 Ibid.

125 Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 15.

126 Ibid., 16.

127 Ibid.

128 Ibid.

129 Ibid., 24.

130 Ibid., 18.

131 Ibid., 25.

132 Ibid., 15.

133 Ibid.

134 Ibid.

135 Ibid., 25.

136 Ibid., 52.

137 Ibid., 53, 56.

138 Tuqan, Fadwa, A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography, trans. Kenny, Olive (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1990), 64Google Scholar.

139 Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 23.

140 Ibid., 23–24. On the significance of clothing, and specifically the thawb, for post-1948 Palestinian identity, see, for instance, Sherwell, Tina, “Palestinian Costume, the Intifada and the Gendering of Nationalist Discourse,” Journal of Gender Studies 5, no. 3 (1996): 293–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abu-Ghazaleh, Faida N., Ethnic Identity of Palestinian Immigrants in the United States: The Role of Cultural Material Artifacts (El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly), 2011Google Scholar.

141 Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 24–25. The spatial boundary may have also been a result of the different eating customs of urbanites and villagers. I thank the IJMES anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

142 Domestic workers who lived in urban areas also exposed elite urban children to the lower-class urban neighborhoods.

143 Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 17.

144 Karmi, Ghada, Return: A Palestinian Memoir (London: Verso, 2015), 262Google Scholar. The last time Ghada saw Fatima was in 1948, when the Karmi family left Jerusalem for Damascus. Fatima and her brother Muhammad stayed behind, and Fatima looked after the Karmis’ house in Qatamon in anticipation of the Karmis’ return following the war. The Karmis did not return, nor did they hear any news about Fatima's fate in the war and its aftermath. As an adult, in 2005, Ghada Karmi returned to what had become Israel and the West Bank in search of more information about Fatima. She eventually found Fatima's nephew, who told her that Fatima and her daughters fled from al-Maliha to Bethlehem in the summer of 1948 (262–72).

145 Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 18.

146 Ibid., 19.

147 According to Ghada's father, if a man wore round trousers it meant he had peasant origins, for when peasants traded their traditional loose trousers for urban clothes, they did not learn how to correctly iron their pants; ibid.

148 Rose, John H. Melkon, Armenians of Jerusalem: Memories of Life in Palestine (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993), 101Google Scholar.

149 Ibid.

150 Nammar, Jacob J., Born in Jerusalem, Born Palestinian: A Memoir (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2012), 36Google Scholar.

151 Ibid.

152 Ibid.

153 Ibid., 37.

154 Swedenburg, “Palestinian Peasant,” 22–25. See also Swedenburg, Ted, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

155 Sitta, Salman Abu, Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016), 6–7Google Scholar.

156 Al-Hayat, 28 January 1931, 1. Al-Hayat ran a follow-up article on this topic, exploring and condemning the economic conditions that led to this status; 1 February 1931, 1.

157 The government passed an ordinance in 1933 deeming any contract for the employment of girls for over one year unenforceable. See Likhovsky, Assaf, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 85–105Google Scholar.