Family

The family is perhaps the only societal institution that is regarded widely as both natural and essential. The biological basis of kin ties and the reproductive capacities of women historically have conferred that status on the family. This emphasis on biology has led to reductionist and functionalist accounts of the family that transcend cultural barriers. For example the sociologist Talcott Parsons (Parsons and Bates 1955), using a functionalist perspective, argued that the modern family has two main functions: to socialize children into a normative system of societal values and inculcate appropriate status expectations and to provide a stable emotional environment that will protect (male) workers from the psychological damage of the alienating occupational world. These functions are carried out by the wife and mother: She plays the affective, expressive role of nurturer and support, whereas the husband plays the instrumental role of earning the family's keep and maintaining discipline. In similar fashion, the Egyptian Islamist Seyid Qutb spoke of the family as "the nursery of the future," breeding "precious human products" (Choueiri 1990, pp. 127-128). According to Qutb, a man and a woman voluntarily enter into a relationship of marriage as two complementary partners, each discharging functions assigned by nature and biology. A woman fulfills her functions by being a wife and mother, and a man is the undisputed authority, the breadwinner, and the active member in public life (Haddad 1983).

THE ROLE OF SOCIALIZATION

Social scientists differ in their explanations of the biological, cultural, and social underpinnings of the family, but most agree that socialization plays a major role in the perpetuation of the sexual division of labor in the family and society. Socialization patterns ensure that girls and boys will be raised differently, with different expectations of their place in the family and the society. In this way attitudes and practices regarding gender and sex have shaped notions of the family. Similarly, the sexual division of labor in the family has reinforced attitudes toward and practices of gender and sex as well as state policies regarding women's roles.

THE MYTHIC GOLDEN AGE OF THE FAMILY

For some feminists the family is the site of women's oppression and gender inequality, whereas for some psychoanalysts it is the source of personality disorders or conditions such as the Oedipus and Electra complexes. Nevertheless, the family is regarded by many as a haven in a heartless world. Some have argued that in Europe and North America, this concept of the family emerged in the course of struggles against the market and the state.

Conservative commentators warn against the breakdown of the family and family values. In the former Soviet Union during the restructuring known as perestroika in the late 1980s, social problems were blamed on the overemployment of women and their forced detachment from the family under communism. The solution, in that view, was to reduce female labor-force attachment and increase female family attachment. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, a romanticization of the family, domesticity, and the private sphere, combined with an emphasis on women's maternal role, followed the end of communist rule.

According to the sociologist Rebecca Klatch (1994), for the conservative movement in the United States in the 1980s, the ideal society was one in which individuals were "integrated into a moral community, bound together by faith, by common moral values, and by obeying the dictates of the family and religion" (p. 369). In this ideal community, male and female roles are respected as essential and complementary components of God's plan but men are the spiritual leaders and decision makers in the family. Women's role is to support men through altruism and self-sacrifice. Similarly, a contemporary Muslim view sees the family as the fundamental unit of society and stresses the mother's role in the socialization of children, particularly in raising committed Muslims and transmitting cultural values. According to the Iranian Islamist thinker Murteza Mutahhari (1982), marriage and family life are central to social reproduction and are "a sublime manifestation of the Divine Will and Purpose." He argues that "mutual affection and sincerity, as well as humane compassion and tenderness," are highly desirable attributes in married couples and "are often in evidence in societies governed by Islamic moral and legal checks and balances. In the others, such as those in the Europe and North America, these qualities are seldom noticeable" (pp. 7, 31, 58).

The 1990s saw the formation of a coalition of conservative Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant governmental and nongovernmental organizations in defining and dealing with family values. That coalition first formed around what it saw as objectionable recommendations pertaining to women's sexual rights in connection with the United Nations (UN) International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which took place in Cairo in 1994, and the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW), which was held in Beijing in 1995. The alliance regrouped in June 2001 at the special session of the United Nations General Assembly on AIDS in New York to stop what it saw as the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays being pushed by the European Union.

Lamentations about the current condition of the family imply that at an earlier period, the family was more stable and harmonious than it is in the early twenty-first century. However despite massive research historians have not located a golden age of the family, as Stephanie Coontz (1992) found in the case of the United States. John Caldwell (1982) notes that many writers have tended to romanticize the peasant family even though Russian peas-ant women and girls worked 1.21 times as many hours as men and boys. Teodor Shanin (1987) points out that despite their heavy burden of labor (both housework and fieldwork) and their functional importance in the Russian peasant household, women were considered second-class members of the family and nearly always were under the authority of men.

The family is a powerful metaphor that is projected onto communities and even nations. In some accounts the ethnic group or the nation is a kind of family writ large. Notions of ideal family forms, typically accompanied by notions of the ideal woman, are found in an array of religious and nationalist writings and discourses across cultures. Here the ideal is the traditional patriarchal family unit, sometimes extended and sometimes nuclear, in which women are responsible for the biological reproduction and hence the continuity of the community (whether an ethnic group, a religious community, or an aspiring nation), and men are in charge of political, military, and economic matters. Women also are cast as the means by which the group's values are transmitted to the next generation and as symbols of the group's identity; this explains why women's dress and comportment are emphasized and often controlled. During times of transition, conflict, or crisis, nationalist ideologies and the state will stress women's reproductive responsibilities, exhort women to have more children, and/or ban contraception and abortion.

The importance attached to biological reproduction and group identity and the strength of attitudes toward male and female roles are the principal reasons for the continued opposition to nonheterosexual affective relationships and family forms in many parts of the contemporary world. This also explains why there is ambivalence and sometimes hostility toward female-headed households, especially when the female heads are unmarried and have children. The family ideology also is behind the continued control of the sexual behavior of women and girls, especially in more patriarchal settings. Many social scientists, including feminist scholars, have attributed gender inequalities and hierarchies in societies to the persistence of traditional family upbringing and the sexual division of labor in the household. Scholars of second-wave feminism wrote about the oppression of women within the family, whether as daughters, sisters, or wives, and called for equality in the family as well as in other societal institutions.

PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY AND THE FAMILY: RISE AND DECLINE

In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels (1972) wrote about the "world-historical defeat of the female sex" (Engels 1972, p. 68) in the wake of the agricultural revolution and the advent of civilization and class society. The historian Gerda Lerner (1986) opposed Engels's narrative by arguing that the subordination of women—the creation of patriarchy enforced by legal codes in the ancient Near East—enabled the development of private property and state power there and elsewhere.

The persistence of patriarchy is a matter of debate, and some feminist theorists argue that industrialized societies are also patriarchal. Sylvia Walby (1996) distinguishes between the private patriarchy of the premodern family and social order and the public patriarchy of the state and the labor market in industrial societies. In his work on South Korea, John Lie (1996) distinguished between agrarian patriarchy and patriarchal capitalism. Others have used the term patriarchy more strictly so that patriarchal society is cast as a precapitalist social formation that historically has existed in varying forms in Europe and Asia.

In the patrilocally extended household—commonly associated with the reproduction of the peasantry in agrarian societies—property, residence, and descent proceed through the male line. The senior man has authority over everyone else in the family, including younger men, and women are subject to control and subordination. Childbearing is the central female labor activity. Women's honor, along with, by extension, the honor of the family, depends in great measure on their virginity and good conduct. A study of "the values of Mediterranean society" described the importance of manliness, woman's sexual purity, and defense of family honor in Andalusia, Spain; in villages in Greece and Cyprus; and among the Kabyle in Algeria and the Bedouins of Egypt (Peristiany 1966).

As John Caldwell (2001) and Deniz Kandiyoti (1985) separately described it, the contemporary belt of classic patriarchy includes areas in North Africa, the Muslim Middle East (including Turkey and Iran), and southern and eastern Asia (Pakistan, Afghanistan, northern India, and rural China). In those places one finds practices such as adolescent marriage of girls, high fertility, a preference for sons, and abortion of female fetuses (largely restricted to India and China). In many areas the preoccupation with female virginity leads to honor killings when there has been real or perceived sexual misconduct by a female relative. Such killings of females who are considered to have transgressed the norms of proper sexual behavior are meant to cleanse the violation of the family's integrity and restore its respectability and honor.

STRATEGIES FOR REPRODUCTION AND EXPANSION OF THE FAMILY

Family strategies for reproduction and expansion are varied. One strategy is endogamy, the practice of marrying within the lineage. In many cultures cousin marriage is used to keep property within the lineage and is associated with adolescent marriage, especially for girls. Jack Goody (1990) argues that endogamy mitigates the view of women as property, rejecting the classic Claude Lévi-Strauss's view of women as pawns who embody transaction and exchange, a view adopted by Gayle Rubin (1975). Lévi-Strauss (1969) studied primitive groups, which were exogamous, whereas Arab-Islamic tribes are endogamous. Nonetheless, many scholars continue to view endogamy as being related to patrilineality, which privileges men in terms of property ownership and control over family resources. In such settings women are considered a form of property.

In a study of northern Africa, Germaine Tillion (1983) identified endogamy as setting the stage for the oppression of women in patrilineal society long before the rise of Islam. Endogamy, she argued, kept property (land and animals) within the lineage and protected the economic and political interests of men. Endogamy increases the tendency to maintain property within families by controlling women in tightly interrelated lineages.

Endogamous and exogenous marriages alike entail some form of bride price or bride wealth. Often this transaction is meant to compensate the father, extended family, or tribe for the loss of a girl's labor power. Sometimes it is the price of the girl's deflowering; at other times it signifies the respectability and value of the girl or that of her family. It can take the form of cattle, jewelry, or money. Studies on Afghanistan find that the bride price (walwar in Pashto) signifies an interfamilial exchange.

Nancy Tapper (1984) has described the mobility and migration patterns that revolved around the bride price in Afghanistan in the 1970s. Men from one region would travel to another area to find inexpensive wives, and fathers would travel in search of a higher price for their daughters. In the Muslim communities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) the dower (mahr) goes from groom to bride. In India it goes from the bride's family to the groom's family (dowry). In either case it can be an onerous financial burden. More important, dowry and dower are remnants of a patriarchal inegalitarian past in which parents sell their daughters. In all cases inheritance practices favor male kin, and those practices often are codified in law.

Another strategy of family (or kinship) reproduction and expansion is polygyny. The practice of multiple wives for a man is rooted in tribal imperatives and the agrarian economy, which requires the labor power of women and children. In the early twenty-first century polygynous households are most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, which remains largely rural and agrarian. Although Muslims claim that their religion permits men to marry up to four wives, urbanization and educational attainment have led to a decline in the practice and an expansion of nuclear families among Muslim communities in urban settings. Whereas family structure in the MENA region once was described as extended, patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal, endogamous, and occasionally polygynous, in urbanized countries in that region polygny has become a statistically insignificant family form. Monogamy is the norm, and the recent reform of family law in Morocco has made it extremely difficult for a man to obtain a second wife; however, only Turkey and Tunisia have banned polygyny outright.

CHANGES IN HOUSEHOLDS AND FAMILIES

Some of the most extensive studies on changes in household or family types and the impact of economic changes on women's status have been undertaken in Turkey. In the 1970s Kandiyoti delineated six socioeconomic categories of women: nomadic, traditional rural, changing rural, small town, newly urbanized squatter (gecekondu), and urban middle-class professionals and housewives (Kandiyoti 1985). Family form and household composition varied across those groups, as did the sexual division of labor. An interesting discovery was that the patrilocal extended household was being undermined by market incorporation, migration, and poverty, although patriarchal attitudes and practices remained strongest in the countryside. The patrilineal extended household is similarly characteristic of rural areas elsewhere in MENA but is less typical in large metropolitan areas, where neolocal residence is assumed upon marriage and the nuclear family form prevails.

Nuclear families, however, can continue to be patriarchal, partly as a result of the provisions of family law. The gender hierarchies and inequalities of the law may allow parents to beat their children and husbands to beat their wives. Brothers inherit more than sisters do, and a deceased man's wealth may be inherited by his male kin as well as by his widow or widows and children. Divorce may be obtained easily by a man but is very difficult for a woman, and after divorce, the children remain with their father or his kin. The husband is entitled to exercise his marital authority by restraining his wife's movements and preventing her from showing herself in public. This is the case because Arab-Islamic culture privileges patrilineal bonds and enjoins men to take responsibility for the support of their wives and children. The wife's main obligations are to maintain a home, care for her children, and obey her husband. Valentine M. Moghadam (2003) has referred to this as the "patriarchal gender contract." In the MENA region the patriarchal contract has been codified by the state in the form of Muslim family law or personal status codes, which usually are based on an interpretation by one of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence.

Studies of patriarchal family forms and kinship ties have been conducted by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, including feminist scholars. The social anthropologist Jack Goody (1990) drew attention to two major kinship systems: African and Eurasian. The sociologist William Goode (1963) argued that the nuclear family form in the Europe and North America would be replicated in other parts of the world because it was best suited to the requirements of industrialization. More recently, Göran Therborn (2004) surveyed family systems across time and place and identified five geocultural patterns, each of which has been shaped largely by its predominant religion: European (including New World and Pacific settlements): East Asia, sub-Saharan African, West Asia/North Africa, and South Asia. Two additional interstitial family forms are religiously hybrid: the southeastern Asian and the Creole American. All traditional family systems, Therborn argues, include three regimes: patriarchy, marriage, and fertility. Echoing the work of other scholars, he argues that whereas at the turn of the twentieth-century patriarchy in the classic sense of male domination was a universal pattern, by the twenty-first century patriarchy had experienced a serious decline.

Many sociologists have attributed this decline to the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and educational attainment, along with the social changes caused by the youth rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s and second-wave feminism. Therborn also stresses the effects of wars and revolutions and especially the ideologies and political systems of communism and socialism, which transformed the family in Russia and China. He agrees with other scholars that the patriarchal holdouts are Muslim and Hindu communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Asia. In Euro-American postpatriarchal societies social movements and equal rights have led to significant changes in family systems, although women remain unequal in terms of political and economic power.

The other two family regimes of marriage and fertility also have undergone change. Divorce, cohabitation, and extramarital birth are very common, and civil unions have been increasing in European and North American societies. In the United States 70 percent of women age twenty to twenty-four were married in 1960, but by 2000, that proportion had dropped to 23 percent. In Tunisia the average age at first marriage has risen dramatically, reaching twenty-eight years for women in 2005. However, Therborn points out that heterosexual marriage, along with monogamy, remains universal, the principal way of regulating sexual behavior and sexual bonding. In regard to fertility Therborn cites the major demographic literature to show how birth rates have been falling throughout the world and across the family systems, with some variations. Such a demographic transition, in which previously high-fertility countries such as Iran have seen major decreases in family size, is the result of the usual sociological and economic explanations of urbanization, educational attainment, and the increasing cost of caring for children, along with modern ideologies of socialism, secularism, and feminism that have promoted family planning or women's control over their own bodies.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION, THE FAMILY, AND SEXUALITY

The demographic transition involves a change from the high-mortality and high-fertility characteristic of preindustrial societies to a pattern of low mortality and low fertility. John Caldwell (1982) argued that in Western Europe, the economic and demographic transitions coevolved: The transition from the traditional peasant (family-based) economy to the capitalist economy entailed changes in decisions about and the need for reproduction. There was less rationality for having large families because the cost of each additional child increased. In England and France the rate of population growth increased up until 1780 and then slowed after 1820 and 1879 in France and England, respectively. Although lower fertility rates came about in European and North American societies over the course of industrialization and urbanization, another important source of instability in the family-based system of production and reproduction, according to Caldwell, was "the egalitarian strain in the modern European ideology, powerfully augmented by the spread of education" (Caldwell 1982, p. 176). Marriage patterns also changed in the course of the demographic transition in Western Europe.

In the 1960s modernization theorists predicted that fertility and household patterns in European and North American societies would be adopted in developing countries that wanted to enhance their social and economic development. The World Fertility Survey (WFS) conducted in forty-one countries between 1977 and 1982 (World Fertility Survey 1984) found that women with higher education living in urban settings tended to have fewer children. The WFS also found that high fertility persisted in a number of regions, notably the Middle East, North Africa, southern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. As late as 1988 Algeria reported 5.4 births per woman, and the Islamic Republic of Iran reported 5.6 births per woman. The 1990s, however, saw declines in the region as a whole and a dramatic decline in Iran.

Demographers who have studied global fertility decline since the 1960s offer varied explanations for the fertility transition: mortality reduction; reduced economic contributions from children; the opportunity cost of childbearing, especially for mothers; family transformation; vanishing cultural props for childbearing; improved access to fertility regulation; marriage delay; and the diffusion of certain ideas and practices. Caldwell (2001) cites the role of ideologies, attitudes, and the mechanisms of fertility control but points out that inadequate socioeconomic change may explain why some countries or some social groups within countries have been excluded from the global fertility decline. Karen Oppenheim Mason (2001) adds gender to the equation, arguing that the status of women and the family determines some of the explanations described above. The status of women is thus both an independent variable and a dependent variable in the demographic transition.

Socioeconomic development, state, gender, and class certainly play roles in fertility. The patriarchal family and the agrarian economy both favor high fertility. In protoindustrial societies the merchants (the traditional elite) organize their families much as farmers do and feel few, if any, ill effects from high fertility. By contrast, the fully developed labor market mode of production offers no rewards for high fertility. There is evidence that the labor status of the wife, especially if she works in the modern sector of the economy (the nonagricultural cash economy), is an important determinant of marital fertility. State policies may encourage or penalize large families. Women's lower status means restricted access to education and employment and hence higher fertility. Because women from elite families generally have the highest degree of access to education and employment, fertility also varies by class. Higher levels of education tend to result in more knowledge and use of contraceptives, although the availability of family planning programs is also an important variable. Salaried middle-class women have the fewest children.

These analyses help explain the demographic transition in MENA and its implications for the status of women, gender relations, and the family. As in other developing regions in the twentieth century, the demographic transition occurred more rapidly in MENA than it occurred in Europe, though it occurred later than in Latin America and southeastern Asia. The Demographic and Health Surveys statistics from the early 1990s in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen, along with many other developing countries, found that rural versus urban residence, education, and socioeconomic status determined the number of children as well as the health of the mother and child. In general, the surveys found lowering fertility rates and a rising age of marriage in the MENA countries surveyed (survey data are available at the Demographic and Health Surveys web site).

On average, fertility in MENA countries declined from seven children per woman in around 1960 to 3.6 children in 2001. As Farzaneh Roudi (2001) has shown, only Yemen has been relatively unchanged, and the average number of births per woman there is close to eight. In Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey, the combined effects of socioeconomic development, women's educational attainment, and state-sponsored family planning programs have produced the lowest fertility rates in the region. Indeed, the average of about 2.5 children per woman in these countries is even lower than the fertility rate in many Latin-American countries.

Thus, urbanization, industrialization, proletarianization, and mass schooling, which were so important in the demographic transition and the decline of classic patriarchy in the Europe and North America are present in the MENA region and have altered the social structure and gender relations, including the family system. Developmentalist, welfarist, and revolutionary states also have helped bring about societal changes, including legal reforms that bolster women's position in the family. Those reforms are an important basis for the ability of women to act autonomously. However, perhaps most important has been the expansion of schooling for girls. As Fatima Mernissi (1987, p. xxv) has stated: "Access to education seems to have an immediate, tremendous impact on women's perception of themselves, their reproductive and sex roles, and their social mobility expectations." These social changes have led to differentiation among the female population and an expansion of the range of options available to women, including the right to make informed choices about marriage and childbearing. These trends are relevant to a growing proportion of the urban female population, and they have been visible enough to result in opposition by conservative forces. Those forces see the relative rise in the position of women as having the potential to undermine the traditional patriarchal family.

Caldwell (2001) has argued that mass schooling probably has had a greater impact on the family in developing countries than it had in Europe and North America. First, mass schooling came in many countries at an earlier stage of economic and occupational structure development than it did in Europe and North America. Second, schooling frequently means westernization, including European and North American concepts of family and gender. According to Caldwell, "Schools destroy the corporate identity of the family, especially for those members previously most submissive and most wholly contained by the family: children and women" (2001, p. 322). Mernissi similarly emphasized the role of state-sponsored education in creating two generations of independent women. These are the women, Moghadam (2003) notes, who are forming feminist organizations that seek further social changes, including the modernization of family law and the criminalization of honor crimes and domestic violence.

Algeria and Iran, two large MENA countries, are representative of the profound family changes that are occurring in that region. Whereas a few decades ago the majority of women married before age twenty, only 10 percent of that age group in Algeria and 18 percent in Iran were married by the early twenty-first century. This is despite the fact that the age of marriage was lowered to puberty after the Iranian revolution and is age fifteen. The surge in unmarried young people and the fear of illicit sex led some Islamist leaders, such as then-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, to encourage temporary marriage (muta'a in Arabic, sigheh in Persian) and an Islamic contractual arrangement for sexual relations. Temporary marriage is, however, highly unpopular in Iran's middle-class society, which associates it with legalized prostitution.

Elsewhere more young people are remaining unmarried. In Turkey 14 percent, in Morocco 13 percent, and in Tunisia 3 percent of young women age fifteen to nineteen were married in the 1990s. Mernissi has argued that the idea of a young unmarried woman is completely novel in the Muslim world, for the concept of patriarchal honor is built around the idea of virginity, which reduces a woman's role to its sexual dimension: reproduction within an early marriage. The concept of a menstruating and unmarried woman is so alien to the Muslim family system, Mernissi adds, that it is either unimaginable or necessarily is linked with fitna, or moral and social disorder. The unimaginable has become a reality. Young men faced with job insecurity or lacking a diploma to guarantee access to desired jobs postpone marriage. Women, faced with the pragmatic necessity to count on themselves instead of relying on a rich husband, further their formal education. Rates of higher education have increased, and in a number of MENA countries, women's enrollments exceed those of men.

REACTIONS TO RECENT CHANGES IN THE FAMILY

There is a consensus that the dramatic increase in education among North American women in the postwar era was a major cause of the women's movement. The baby boomers went to college in massive and unprecedented numbers. College education increased women's labor-force participation; at the same time there was an expansion of labor participation by married women. A similar pattern can be discerned in MENA countries. Activist women, married and unmarried, emerge from the ranks of the educated and employed. This rapid social change—the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and education on marriage, the family, and gender roles—has caused a conservative backlash and a rise in religious fundamentalist movements as well as lamentations about eroding family values.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Caldwell, John C. 1982. Theory of Fertility Decline. London: Academic Press.

Caldwell, John C. 2001. "The Globalization of Fertility Behavior." In Global Fertility Transition, ed. Rodolfo A. Bulatao and John B. Casterline. New York: Population Council.

Choueiri, Youssef. 1990. Islamic Fundamentalism. London: Pinter.

Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books.

Demographic and Health Surveys. Available from http://www.measuredhs.com/.

Engels, Friedrich. 1972. The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press. (Orig. pub. 1884.)

Goode, William Josiah. 1963. World Revolution and Family Patterns. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.

Goody, Jack. 1990. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. 1983. "Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival." In Voices of a Resurgent Islam, ed. John Esposito. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1985. Women in Rural Production Systems: Problems and Policies. Paris: UNESCO.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1988. "Bargaining with Patriarchy." Gender & Society 2(3): 274-290.

Klatch, Rebecca. 1994. "Women of the New Right in the United States: Family, Feminism and Politics. In Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam. Boulder, CO: Westview

Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lie, John. 1996. "From Agrarian Patriarchy to Patriarchal Capitalism: Gendered Capitalist Industrialization in Korea." In Patriarchy and Economic Development: Women's Positions at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam. New York: Clarendon Press.

Mason, Karen Oppenheim. 2001. "Gender and Family Systems in the Fertility Transition." In Global Fertility Transition, ed. Rodolfo A. Bulatao and John B. Casterline. New York: Population Council.

Mernissi, Fatima. 1987. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Moghadam, Valentine, M., ed. 1994. Identity Politics: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Moghadam, Valentine M., ed. 1996. Patriarchy and Development: Women's Positions at the End of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Moghadam, Valentine M. 2003. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. 2nd edition. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner.

Mutahhari, Murteza. 1982. Sexual Ethics in Islam and in the Western World, trans. Muhammad Khurshid Ali. Tehran, Israel: Bonyad Be'that Foreign Department.

Parsons, Talcott, and Robert F. Bales. 1955. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Peristiany, J. G., ed. 1966. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1977. The Fate of Shechem: Or, The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Roudi, Farzaneh. 2001. "Population Trends and Challenges in the Middle East and North Africa." Washington DC: Population Reference Bureau Policy Brief.

Rubin, Gayle. 1975. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on a Political Economy of Sex." In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Shanin, Teodor. 1987. "A Peasant Household: Russia at the Turn of the Century." In Peasants and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings. 2nd edition, ed. Teodor Shanin. London: Blackwell.

Tapper, Nancy. 1984. "Causes and Consequences of the Abolition of Brideprice in Afghanistan." In Reveolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan, ed. Nazif Shahrani, and Robert Canfield. Berkeley: University of California Berkeley International Studies Institute.

Therborn, Göran. 2004. Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900–2000. London: Routledge.

Tillion, Germaine. 1983. The Republic of Cousins: Women's Oppression in Mediterranean Society, trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Al Saqi Books.

Walby, Sylvia. 1996. "The 'Declining Significance' or the 'Changing Forms' of Patriarchy?" In Patriarchy and Development: Women's Positions at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

World Fertility Survey. 1984. World Fertility Survey: Major Findings and Implications. Voorburg, Netherlands: International Statistical Institute.

                                     Valentine M. Moghadam