SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE INDUSTRIAL EXPERIENCE: WOMEN AS PRODUCTION WORKERS IN URBAN EGYPT

This study reassesses accepted generalizations concerning the labor force participation of Arab women using historical, observational and interview data on Egypt's urban working class. Women's low rates of modern-sector participation have been attributed to cultural patterns supporting strict sex segregation which relegate women to the domestic sphere. Employed women have been characterized as marginally committed to employment and most likely to work when single, widowed or divorced. Industrial employment has been linked to the adoption of a complex of "modern" attitudes and behaviors, without specifying intervening mechanisms by which work makes its impact.;Egypt's uneven industrial development before independence lead to sporadic infusions of female labor. Employer preferences for children paralleled optimal task allocations from the standpoint of working-class families. Today, families perceive that prolonged education is translatable into children's upward mobility. As consumer goods replace domestic productive tasks, the wife's earning capacity is increasingly perceived as essential for the realization of family goals.;Evolution of the public sector after 1952 facilitated women's employment throughout marriage and childbearing. Families adopt strategies to maintain wives' employment by reallocating childcare, limiting fertility, and drawing on extended kin. Evaluations of family economic status may lead to female employment despite normative objections of male family members.;Factory work environments act as agents of social change by providing a context in which young girls are socialized into cohesive female work groups. These establish information and support networks in which workers negotiate new attitudes and behaviors. Work simultaneously creates a set of novel behavioral problems for women and provides resources for their solution.;Using an interactionist perspective and elements of dependency theory, cultural explanations are balanced with the structural factors of market demand for labor and familial division of labor. Multiple methods establish the structural context in which employment decisions are made and the subjective experience of work as women move through phases of the domestic cycle.;Employment makes its impact on individuals through the formation of a work identity. Sequencing of work and marital identities is crucial; girls socialized into cohesive work groups, seeing themselves economically independent, form distinct marriages based on cooperative task distribution and oriented toward achievement of middle-class life styles. Indentity salience explains the tendency of working-class dual income families to achieve consensus on lowered fertility. Female gender identity interacts with work identities to produce family-oriented spending patterns. Strain occurs when a woman's employment interferes with the time demands of newly adopted middle-class mothering norms. A woman's work identity contributes to positive self images and sense of efficacy. Married women's sense of competence in multiple identities is contingent on whether these permit achievement of family goals.