Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane of Morocco told Parliament this week that women would be better off at home than in the workplace, setting off alarm in a country that has seen slow but steady gains in women’s rights.
“Today, there is a problem with women’s role in modern society,” he said Tuesday in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, when asked about the government’s position on women’s rights. “Women don’t even find time to get married, to be mothers or to educate their children. Why don’t we embrace this sacred status that God gave to women?”
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Some observers pointed out that with municipal elections coming up, the prime minister, popular for his plain speech in a local dialect, could have just been playing politics, trying to appeal to the conservative voters who dominate in Morocco. The Justice and Development Party, after all, has more female members of Parliament than any other party.
“What Benkirane is defending — family values, complementary roles instead of equality — is in line with what the vast majority of Moroccans think,” said Youssef Belal, a political science researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “It can also be argued that he is using language that feminists use internationally, which is that taking care of a household should be considered work and valued.”
Since Mr. Benkirane’s party took power in November 2011 and formed a coalition with three others, the Islamists have been careful to keep their ideology out of politics. In January, for example, Parliament amended a law to eliminate a loophole that had allowed rapists to walk free if they married their victims.Absent the prime minister's religious invocation, there is much truth to what he says. Neoliberal capitalism does not allow most women to play a traditional role. Wages on average are too low for the man to provide the sole income for a household. This means the woman must, not may, enter the workforce. And once the woman enters the workforce it is not a reasonable or sustainable expectation for her to maintain her title as keeper of the home and custodian of the hearth. While today women earn about 77 cents on the dollar compared to men in the United States, this is an improvement over the 67 cents of last decade.
The trend in the West, and apparently the periphery as well, is towards post-familialism. People, both men and women, live alone if they can afford to, while trying to find equality at work (without the need for complementarity at home because at home you are alone). This is really what I mean by "burdens of a bachelor." One has to do it all by oneself. The cleaning and cooking and earning of wages and the emotional upkeep and maintenance of the self.
Traditional family values are on the way out, though they are likely to remain a potent nostalgia item for politicians to pitch.
