Arab Women and Education :: Family Identity Essays

Arab Women and EducationWhether it was the impoverished desert village, the war torn hills of Beirut, affluent Barqais, the kilobyte set in London and Paris, or the enclosed lives of women in a harem in Morocco, the female characters in these novels all in all shared cardinal common threads that dealt with the family and the search for individuality. In my reading of five novels near Arab women from backgrounds and in situations as diverse as I thought possible, I was surprised to find this common thread running through all(prenominal) piece of literature. In this paper, I will analyze the role the womens families have in the education of the women, the role of women and families in the literature in political support and times of war, womens health and family planning, and most of all what these issues do to the emerging identity of the Arab woman. In a society that is so oriented around the extended family, and in which elderly parents are rarely if ever sent to nursing home s, the familys opinion weighs heavily on what a woman can and cannot do with her life. The examination of the manner in which education is regarded in the families of these women is critical for a better understanding of the decisions they make. In a traditionally patriarchal society where the man is the breadwinner, the assessment of the case of work outside the home is also interesting. In a kingdom so riddled with almost constant political and military upheaval, in that location has been bound to have been a change in the roles women in the family laugher in support of these political and military actions. Finally, the issue of identity is such(prenominal) more prominent in the more fresh novels and the issue of the modern family versus the individual and the rise of the individual from the modern family plays very prominently in In the Eye of the Sun and Dreams of Trespass. The Arab family, as Magida Salman writes, is where the fate of women is universe decided and unfold s (Salman 7). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the huge impact the family has on the identity of Arab women. Identity as a concept is valuable as a center for cross-cultural understandings of human experience because it begins with the individual, and issues of identity in a literary context can act as a mirror for what is happening in the real world.