Case-based research involves the focusing on peoples and particulars in a context, and from those experiences, the microcosms, there is a conversation about things larger. Journalist Leslie T. Chang’s Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation (2024) follows the experiences of several women linked to the textiles industry in Egypt from 2011 to 2016.
Chang uses her engagements with various individuals as research informants, conduits to understanding “the country’s divorce laws, its educational policies, and its changing interpretations of Islam.” Three main individuals emerge.
Rania Saeed Mohamed, 22, works on a textile factory assembly line. She commutes an hour’s bus ride from her village to get to and from work. She has been recruited to work on the production line at the factory initially but is transitioned to quality control. Those who run the textile factories have a hard time recruiting workers since Egyptian culture does not encourage its young women to work outside the home. The young women are expected to marry young, have children, and ensure that their husbands are happy in those homes. In most cases, young women may work because their families are needy, and also because the women want to save up funds for their own trousseaus, which are required to attract potential husbands. Some women need to support their children, or they have to manage their households after a divorce.
Then, there is Riham Galal Seif El-Din, a business woman who broke off from her family’s textile business to open her own factory. She has dreams of helping out young Egyptian women find their potential.
And there is Doaa Mohsen, a divorced mother and worker, who is also attending the University of Minya.
With globalization, female employment is seen as liberatory. In the first factory, the female workers work six days a week, 8 hours a day, for the equivalence of $80 a month. They ride company mini-busses that take them from their villages into the factory. They have free healthcare. They are recruited not with a story of women’s rights, which won’t play, but with one about providing for their financial and material needs.
The owners of the $2.5 million factory have high hopes for this investment. Chang writes:
In a country where people often run late, sleep through breakfast, and eat lunch around dinnertime, the Delta Textile Factory had an optimistic timetable…The company wanted to have six hundred fully trained workers by the middle of 2016, and to have them reach global standards of efficiency within the following twelve months. Most of the recruits would be women from farming villages who had never worked outside the home; a quarter were illiterate. And the mid-2016 deadline fell smack in the middle of the month of Ramadan, when women are expected to stay home to cook, clean, and spend time with their families.
The Israeli-owned company asks her to hide the company’s parentage given the rampant anti-Semitism in Egypt. The women workers negotiate through fainting spells and dramatic behaviors. Egyptian workers, in the global marketplace, have a reputation of not being particularly hardworking; they smoke, do drugs, head to the coffee house, nap at their work stations, and are considered an argumentative workforce. She posits that former president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the country’s banks and other companies in 1956 contribute to a passive and entitled sense towards work.
Still, the outreach to the female workers is couched as trying to change up the society to be more pro-female. Perhaps their outside work will change up power dynamics at home. Perhaps the women may find more social supports through workplaces. Perhaps they will pursue more education. Perhaps they will find value in work and not just child-bearing. Perhaps their living standards will rise. Perhaps more progressive ideas may come to the fore. Or, in Egypt’s case, Chang wonders if any of the assertions prior apply.
As one of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Egypt has a contemporaneous cultural and religious-based resistance to women working outside of the house:
Resistance to female employment is grounded in a specific idea about male dignity. When a woman works outside the home, her family and community often interpret this act as a failure on the part of her husband. Chapter 4, verse 34, of the Quran says: Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because God has given the one more than the other, and because they support them from their means.
The social ideal for young women is to be a sitt bayt or “housewife.” For Rania’s peers at the Delta Textile Factory, the focus is on important things:
It was a place where a woman marked time until something really important—engagement, marriage, childbirth—happened and took her away from here.
The selection of focus on the centuries-old textiles industry in Egypt is a well conceptualized one. After all, Egypt has had a global reputation for its excellent cotton as an export. It is a field that attracts many of the uneducated women. [Many of the males who are of employment age are recruited abroad to high paying jobs in the Middle East.] Wifely submission to her husband is “written into the Egyptian legal code.” The women are discouraged from traveling far from home on public transportation for fear of sexual harassment. They are not culturally comfortable with working next to men in workplaces, at least among the less educated. Still, for every one working woman in Egypt, some four are not working. In terms of those seeking work, women have 20% unemployment, and men have 5%. The cultural practices are projected to keep the country less developed and less competitive.
Egypt has some powerful metrics for social advancement in terms of gender equality. Girls and boys attend school in equal numbers. There are more women enrolled in Egyptian universities than men. The public sector has “gender-blind hiring and wages, good benefits, short workdays, and large workplaces with the stamp of respectability,” even as the sector is shrinking. The author writes of contradictions:
A woman has the legal right to vote, run for office, and serve her country as its ambassador, government minister, or president. But she can’t marry without a male guardian’s approval, retain custody of her children if she remarries, or work or travel without her husband’s consent.
With her knack for astute observations and understanding of history, sociology, politics, and economics, Chang interweaves Egypt’s past as an explanation for its present. She points to missteps when globalization came to Egypt:
A country needs strong leadership and smart policies to benefit from opening to the outside world. It needs measures to attract investment; its companies must find their competitive niches; its workers require training and skills. A country lacking these advantages is more likely to be pummeled or exploited in its encounter with global competition. Egypt is the largest source of migrant labor in the Middle East, with around eight million men living and working away from home.
The manufacturing of textiles in Egypt did not create an industrial base or a private sector or a wage labor force, she notes. Rather, the country became “a giant plantation” that grew cotton for British mills. And the population “grew reliant on imports of clothes and other manufactured goods from Europe—its domestic industry decimated, as in so many places around the world, by a global commercial system dominated by Great Britain. Egyptian cotton was still the finest in the world, but the innovation, development, and profits that accompanied its manufacture went somewhere else.”
She makes a clear argument that while women in Egypt in the past were much more integrated in the world of work, the present dominance of Wahhabist ideas from Saudi Arabia and more conservative religious leadership have kept women fairly constrained. She depicts public spaces as dominated by men who intimidate women who are walking down the street by themselves and pairs and small groups of women walking without men as their guardians.
Riham Mohamed Galal Seif El-Din is the most colorful of the three individuals Chang described in this book. She works at Textile Leaders, where she is a supervisor known for having the most productive (fastest) lines in the factory. Riham’s ambition:
Inside the walls of her factory, she embarked on a radical experiment: to build a system that taught young women discipline, accountability, and pride in their work, where their families, schools, and society had failed.
She is recruiting 13 to 15 year-olds, those middle-school aged, because many are married by their late teens. She thinks to cross-train them, so that they are aware of other steps in the manufacturing process. She applies some scientific ideas of management to increase speed and still ensure basic quality. She thinks entrepreneurially. She observes the market and identifies what may be missing…that her factory can provide…and innovates. She deploys her various skills to survive in a cutthroat factory.
Spark fly in many of the domestic descriptions of the women’s respective lives. While marriage is portrayed as the ultimate for women, the reality is much less satisfying. Husbands are controlling and restrict their wives’ ambitions. Men take second wives and have more children by younger women. Men find jobs abroad and find other focuses. Husbands and wives hide their finances from each other. Extended family members are constantly plotting and gossiping about family members. When women demand divorces, they are often left without the return of their possessions, which is dictated by law, and many lose access to their children.
Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation describes some nervy work in the far-abroad of Egypt, ruled under a military dictatorship. She arrived in Egypt in October 2011 with her husband and their young twin toddler daughters. Chang worked as a journalist at The Wall Street Journal. She wrote Factory Girls (2009) about her multi-year study of female migrant workers in Chinese factories. She is the recipient of many awards.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
