The problems associated with Bevin's imperial-driven ‘peasants, not pashas’ strategy were numerous, if not overwhelming. Without finance, without the experts, and without the goodwill and receptivity on the part of Middle East governments, Bevin's dreams of promoting a more socially just relationship between Britain and the region lay shattered. Imperial dreams may have died hard as we have seen, but it was inevitable that they would do so given the dynamics of the postwar world. Yet the small, seemingly insignificant core of Bevin's policy, the Development Division of the BMEO, remained in place – beleaguered, underfunded, undermanned, yet still in place. Indeed, if its regional reputation among certain British and Middle East officials by the end of the 1950s is anything to go by, it seemed that, in its own small way, the BMEO flourished. This success was recognized when Britain chose the example of the regionally located development division as the administrative model on which to base its global development programme inaugurated with the establishment of the Department of Technical Cooperation in 1961.

To understand why the seemingly insignificant BMEO retained such relative importance, one needs to change the parameters upon which one judges a development programme. If measured exclusively by inputs and outputs, by increases in GNP and the standard of living in the Middle East, the BMEO was of marginal significance although it did have some unqualified success stories, most notably in Jordan. If reappraised on its ability to generate local initiative and development, necessarily more gradual and incremental, then the work of the BMEO comes out looking more interesting.

After focusing in part I on inheritance and in part II on the dower, the central theme of part III is women's access to property through paid labour. In the preceding chapters I have referred many times to the increased importance of male wage labour but usually the women whose stories I have presented were not employed. In the following chapters, considerable space will be devoted to women's labour stories, which were generally more extensive and detailed than their inheritance and marriage stories. Many women demonstrated their ability in analysing the gendered nature of the inheritance and dower systems, yet except under problematic circumstances, they did not elaborate extensively on their own experiences, as arrangements were largely made for them, not by them. In the case of paid labour this was different. For women working outside the home, their employment was not only a central element in their day-to-day life, but as female paid labour goes against the grain of a system in which men are defined as providers, women often felt the need to talk at length about their motivations.

In debates about Arab women in the labour force some have argued that there is a culturalist bias, with women's low participation in paid employment blamed on ‘the “conservative nature” of Islam’ (see Hijab 1988: 74) or ‘the seemingly inviolable laws and traditions of Islam’ (see Hammam 1986: 158).

After a sketch of the international context, this chapter introduces the main property-related developments in the Jabal Nablus region through the life stories of four women from diverse backgrounds and locations. Certainly, the historical transformation of Palestine has affected the lives of all of them. Yet their experiences also show considerable variation. The gap between rural and urban life in Jabal Nablus has been wide, the experiences of the wealthy had little in common with those of the poor, and the life courses of the women who came as refugees to Nablus show particular discontinuities.

Palestine: the international context

In Ottoman times, the Jabal Nablus region was the most continuously and densely populated region of Palestine, covering the central portion of the interior hills which run in a north–south direction. While Jabal means mountain, the term Jabal Nablus referred to the whole rural hinterland under the control of the city of Nablus, reaching from the coastal plains on the West to the Jordan Valley in the East. Whereas Jabal Nablus had once been a relatively autonomous region of the Ottoman Empire, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman rulers succeeded in strengthening their control over this area.

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.

This section concentrates on the transfer of property from one generation to the next. Considering general socio-economic trends in the Jabal Nablus region, chapter 2 is introductory in several senses. It introduces four women, Imm Sālim, Imm Shākir, Imm Hilmī and Imm Muhammad by presenting their topical life stories and in this way acquaints us with the women whose inheritance and dower practices will be considered in later chapters. Their stories personalise the historical transformation of Palestine, while the accompanying texts on the history of the specific localities where they live – the village of Al-Balad, the city of Nablus and the Balata refugee camp – contextualise their stories. Chapter 2 introduces the major shifts in property relations. Since most property is male owned and controlled, women's direct access to property is only touched upon; terms such as landowner, peasant and so on refer here to men, unless stated otherwise. In fact, the material presented indicates the importance of men, both husband and kin, to the general socio-economic security of women. This is all the more so as none of the four women considered here is formally employed. (Women's access to property through paid labour will be addressed in part III.)

One way for women to gain access to property is through inheritance. According to the prevalent laws of succession in the region a woman is entitled to inherit both from her kin and her husband. Many women I spoke with, in the city as well as in the rural areas, were aware of their inheritance rights. But at the same time they underlined that if urban women might take their share in the estate, rural women by and large refrained from doing so. Such an urban–rural dichotomy is also prevalent in the literature on the subject. A summary of how the literature has dealt with this issue is presented first. This is followed by a brief description of the ways in which women's succession rights have been defined in the legal system. The main body of this chapter concentrates on the question of under which circumstances various categories of women inherit and what this means to them.

Historians and anthropologists: an urban–rural dichotomy?

In the literature on inheritance practices the urban–rural divide tends to coincide with disciplinary boundaries, historians largely focusing on the cities and anthropologists mainly paying attention to the rural areas. Detailed case studies by historians indicate that Muslim women in Ottoman cities did, indeed, inherit. Gerber (1980: 232, 240) argues that in seventeenth-century Bursa the law of inheritance was fully effective concerning women and in many cases they inherited.

If many women left agricultural labour and domestic service after the occupation, at the same time the sewing trade has attracted a large number of lower-class West Bank women. These women reject the idea of going to work in Israel, even if they could earn there considerably more. Their labour is, however, directly linked to the Israeli economy, as most West Bank clothing producers have become subcontractors to Israeli firms.

Developments in garment production on the West Bank are reminiscent of the global process of restructuring and relocation. As little capital is needed to set up a workshop, the sector is generally characterised by ease of entry and intense competition, with low labour costs and high flexibility crucial for profitability (Rainnie 1984: 146). Historically, the garment sector has been marked by a division between manufacturers who perform all steps of the production process (from designing to marketing) and ‘outside shops’ sewing ready cut garments received from a jobber and returning the finished product to him (Lamphere 1979: 258). When it became possible to separate designing/marketing and production on a global scale, the most labour intensive parts of the production process were relocated to the South where a more abundant supply of compliant, flexible and low cost labour was at hand (Fröbel et al. 1980; Rhodes et al. 1983; Morokvasic et al. 1986).

The deferred dower is very different from the prompt dower as a mechanism for women to gain access to property. Women are entitled to receive the deferred dower only under specific conditions, namely if they are repudiated or widowed. This means that relatively few women can claim their deferred dower and that they do so only at a later moment in their life cycle.

In this chapter, the trends in registering a deferred dower are discussed first. The marriage contracts, which are always registered if part of the dower is deferred, indicate that gradually the deferred dower has become more important than the prompt. This discussion looks at the relation between the written texts of marriage contracts and social practice in order to interpret what this means to the women concerned. The case summaries show that women did turn to the court to demand their deferred dower, but divorcees and widows are not proportionally represented. While many more widows than divorced women are entitled to the deferred dower, over two-thirds of the court cases were raised by repudiated women. Why is this? And what happened to those who did not turn to court? Did they receive their deferred dower automatically, or did they refrain from claiming it at all? These questions will be addressed in the following paragraphs.

When I was in Al-Balad in 1981 one of Imm Sālim's granddaughters, Hanān was married. The first time I talked to her the marriage contract had already been signed and with pride she showed me the gifts she had received at the engagement party from Mis'ad, her fiancé. Hanān was pleased with the marriage. Mis'ad was no stranger to her, on the contrary, she had known him all her life. He was not only from the same lineage, but his mother also was her father's sister, while his late father had been her mother's brother. He was only a few years older – she was eighteen at the time, he twenty-two – and had for some years been working in oil production in Kuwait, a job he had found through another brother of his mother who held a good position there for the past twenty-five years.

Mis'ad's mother had been the driving force behind the marriage. A widow with only one son (and three younger daughters) she was very attached to him and counted on his support in the future. Therefore, she had carefully selected her future daughter-in-law. Looking for a girl both her son and she herself would get along with, Hanān seemed suitable. Tall and with a light complexion she fit the local standards of beauty, Imm Mis'ad also knew her as compliant and, of course, she was her brother's daughter.

The hospital close to where I was staying during the summers of 1988 and 1989 turned out to be an excellent location for meeting poor female wage labourers. Most of the women whose stories are presented in this chapter worked there as cleaners. Although their labour stories differ, they had all started working because of financial need. The girls were from impoverished families, the married women had spouses who were unable to provide for them, and the widows and divorced women had been left to their own devices to earn a living. Whereas rural women who had previously worked as agricultural labourers considered hospital cleaning an improvement, for those women from the camps who used to work in Israel, it was usually a negative choice to which they had to resort, since working in Israel was no longer possible after the intifada.

In this chapter, the focus is on two major fields of employment for poor women: agricultural wage labour and domestic service or cleaning. Processes of historical change have had major implications for these types of work. First examined are the wage labour of women, often poor rural widows, in dry-farming agriculture and the circumstances under which some of them have turned to institutional cleaning. This is contrasted with the very different work of refugee women in irrigated agriculture in the Jordan Valley on the one hand, and the work of domestic servants in the private houses of the better-off Nablusi on the other.

The previous chapters discuss the different perspectives expressed by women in the Jabal Nablus region in regard to property and the various strategies they follow. Over time, a major trend has been the partial transition from dower to paid labour as a central mechanism for women to gain access to property. This trend ties in with the greater emphasis on the conjugal bond, rather than on kinship (the natal family) as a main source of women's socio-economic security. At the same time, this study qualifies such generalisations by pointing to the importance of focusing on the situated meanings of women and property, and to the mutiple positions women take up with regard to property. In these last pages I will bring together two lines of argument on women, power, and property. First I will discuss how changes in the construction of the gendered person may both be the effect of power relations and have consequences for women's access to property. Then I will shift the focus to the lived experiences of individual women, linking the multiplicity of their positions to the way in which these are infused with power. Finally, I will briefly return to some issues raised in the introduction.

What women receive when they marry is the starting point of this chapter. Here I will return to the four women introduced in chapter 2 and discuss their marriage stories in greater detail, adding some of the stories of their daughters and granddaughters for the sake of historical comparison. In the Jabal Nablus region, the prompt dower is registered in two very different ways, either as ‘regular prompt dower’, with the registered sum bearing at least some resemblance to what is given, or as ‘token dower’, when a very small sum is recorded (often 1 JD), creating a complete break between the amount stated in the contracts and the gifts received. These two dower patterns will be discussed successively, with particular attention paid to the divergent meanings registering a token dower can have for different categories of women. Next, the sometimes detailed registration of household goods in the contracts is considered and shifts in the nature of the gifts are discussed. The dower will then be contextualised within the process of socio-economic change by relating the value of the dower to the transfer of property from fathers to sons. Before summarising the historical trends in women's access to property through the dower I will briefly discuss ‘intifada marriages’.

If women working in low-status occupations often have to face censure and rebuke, this is not the case if they are employed in the ‘better’ professions, such as teaching. This chapter addresses women's access to property through such professional work. Since access to (higher) education is a pre-condition for women's entry into the professions, the main trends in women's education will be addressed first. The chapter will then trace the development of professional employment: the opening up of new fields and the professionalisation of other types of work, such as nursing. What such work means for women's access to property ties in with the particular background and position of the women involved. In the mandatory period, professional employment was largely limited to single, urban women from well-known families; gradually, however, some non-urban, married and lower-class women have entered the professions. This change is brought out in the following three labour stories.

Employed in the professions: three labour stories

Sitt Yusrā, an elderly teacher from Nablus

When I asked elderly women who had taught them, they often mentioned the name of Sitt Yusrā. Having started her teaching career in the 1930s, she belonged to one of the earliest generations of Nablus teachers still alive. Born in the late 1910s she was the second girl in a prominent, yet impoverished family of five daughters and one son.

If women often refrain from claiming their share in the estate, this does not imply that they have no direct access to property at all. For many women, marriage presentations, the mahr or dower, were and are the most important means by which to acquire property. In part II, I will discuss the historical shifts which have taken place in women's access to such ‘dower property’. Changes in the value and the nature of the property involved will be addressed and related to the variations in the meaning of the dower to different categories of women.

In chapter 4 I summarily discuss the dower as part of the process of arranging marriages in three discursive fields: anthropological theory, Islamic law, and locally held conceptions. After these introductory notes, chapter 5 concentrates on the prompt dower, the gifts the bride receives when she marries, while the deferred dower, that part of the dower women obtain when they are repudiated or widowed, is the central topic of chapter 6. Both chapters set out with a description of historical changes in the dower as registered in the marriage contracts. To discuss possible incongruencies between the written texts and payment practices, this is followed by the words of the women themselves as they speak through court cases and, in particular, through marriage and divorce stories.