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Sally K. Gallagher , Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work , Contemporary Issues in the Middle East (Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press , 2012). Pp. 353. $45.00 cloth.
Gender, Family, and Islam
Making Do in Damascus is a new contribution to scholarship on gender in the Middle East and to the sparse literature on contemporary Syrian society. Written in an engaging style, the book introduces the reader to dozens of mainly Sunni Muslim Damascene women who negotiate personal choices involving marriage, education, and employment amidst social, economic, and political constraints. This portrayal is based on ethnographic research conducted over two decades for which the author effortlessly moved throughout Damascus, from posh neighborhoods to working-class quarters, and visited Palestinian refugee camps in the suburbs. The author explains how women of different socioeconomic backgrounds navigate the expectations of family and society when negotiating personal matters and how they resort to cultural and religious frames of reference as well as draw on the economic and social resources at their disposal to make their choices. Extrapolating from the life choices of this diverse group of women, Gallagher comments broadly on socioeconomic inequalities and opportunities in Damascus and their impact on the construction of gender.
The purpose of Gallagher's research was to challenge prevailing trends in the scholarship of gender "that have come to emphasize the interpersonal construction of gender over larger social and economic forces that shape its range and expression" (p. xiv). According to the author, Syria, with its combination of authoritarianism, a struggling economy, and conservative social traditions, was an ideal site to examine women's agency under macrosocial constraints (p. 6). Between 1992 and 2011, Gallagher made ten visits to Syria for a period of one to four months each, which allowed her to observe economic and political transformations in the country over time (p. 16). In Chapter 2, Gallagher...