The theme: lessons from the field

It was during my first fieldwork in a West Bank village in 1981 that my attention was drawn to property. I was struck by the restrained eagerness with which elderly rural women told me about the dower gold they had received at marriage and what they had done with it. The anthropological literature on the Middle East which I had read rarely referred to women's access to property and if it did so, then the focus was on women's inheritance rights. Yet when I asked women in the village whether they had received an inheritance share, they seemed somehow ill at ease and emphasised that they had refrained from claiming their rights. Questions abounded. Why did elderly women express pride in the fact that they had bought goats and even land from their dower gold, but show discomfort at the thought of claiming a share in their father's estate?

Talking with women from different walks of life further complicated the issue. A superficial reading of the dower system may lead one to interpret it as a transfer of resources from men to women, a system it would seem to be in women's interest to support. Indeed, many rural women considered the dower as an important institution through which they could acquire property. Yet, younger village women rarely expressed an interest in selling their gold to buy productive property; they would rather invest it in their husband and his house.