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Not-So-Restless Single Women Confound Egyptian Society

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By JEFFREY FLEISHMAN, Los Angeles Times

Published: November 11, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt - She sits in a cafe, her laptop unfolded, while at the next table a young man in a suit discreetly reaches for the hand of his fiancee, who blushes and laughs against a window in the night.

The couple whisper, almost conspiring. Mai Hawas knows what that's like. She has been engaged twice, but neither romance lasted - one man was preoccupied with work, the other consumed with money. Now she's 31 and unmarried, a state that bemuses her parents and leaves Egyptian society wondering whether there is something wrong with this quiet woman in the embroidered head scarf.

Hawas' passions are poetry, photography and her job as an architectural engineer at a company sketching designs for Mecca's holy shrine complexes. These, not a man, give her identity. She wants a family, but like an increasing number of educated, professional Egyptian women she craves a wider degree of independence than men are willing to grant and cultural expectations traditionally allow.

"Getting married and having a family is natural," Hawas said. "We all need someone to trust. I don't want to live alone. But I also don't want to give up who I am. The men I meet are educated, yes that's true, but some Egyptian men don't like 'girls' to talk about politics and culture, or to argue with them about ideas. But I have my own personality. I don't need someone else forming my mind."

Marriage here is steeped in negotiations between families over dowries, money and who buys the couch and who the nightstand. But increasingly career-oriented women, along with Egypt's high inflation and low wages, have complicated the scenario. Marriage is now often postponed by young men whose bank accounts are too small to win over a fiancee's family and by independent women less inclined to wed a rich man solely for children and security.
Economic uncertainty has slid into national neurosis; Egyptian nerves are riled these days as many women, either by desire or necessity, attempt to bypass conventions.

A United Nations study found that women made up 18 percent of the labor force in 1996, which rose to 31.4 percent in 2005. The literacy gap between men and women shrank from 43 percent in 1992 to 32 percent two years ago.

'You Can't Step Outside Parameters'

The single, professional woman is "a phenomenon that's definitely been increasing" across the Middle East, said Madiha El Safty, a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo. "These women feel they have a number of things to offer, and to give up, so they've become selective and very choosy. This is especially true among the upper class, but there is still great pressure on women in the lower and middle classes to marry young."

Most unmarried men and women live with their parents in a maze of extended families and whispered advice.

A single woman venturing out to find her own apartment confronts the admonition of religious conservatives, the worry of her parents, the gossip of neighbors and reluctant landlords, many of whom believe that a woman on her own is less than chaste, the kind of trouble that attracts police.

"You can't step outside these parameters," said Hanan Sheikh, a painter and college professor, who to the frustration of her parents remains happily unwed. "My parents would never let me have my own apartment. ... I'm 35 years old, and I still feel like a girl. Slowly our culture has started to recognize us, but it's with pity, like accepting someone who is ill or has cancer."

Breakfasts at Sheikh's house skip from talk of available men to cousins just married to dowries to hints that expectations could be lowered, perhaps even obliterated.

"You have to feel sorry for my parents after a while," Sheikh said. "I have a 9 p.m. curfew in the summer, 7 p.m. in the winter. If not, the neighbors will say, 'Ah, she returned home late again.' If I don't make it home on time, my father comes and picks me up so the neighbors don't talk. In Egypt, everyone's thinking about what others are saying."

Younger women are trying to slip through these strictures. In coffee shops infused with hip-hop and Western motifs, college-age women are growing bolder, some having four or five boyfriends and leading lives that their parents, raised with arranged marriages and the rite of female genital excision, cannot understand.

But Sheikh said tight European jeans and caramel cappuccinos have yet to alter the reality that "Egyptian boys have a conservative mentality and will not marry someone like that."

'I'm Missing Something'

Nahla Emad Abdel Aziz wears a veil; she is not looking for escape. A doctor of internal medicine and a lecturer at Cairo University, the 33-year-old lives with her parents in an apartment building not far from the Nile.

She said today's single women don't have to endure the spinster labels and other stigmas attached to their counterparts of two generations ago. The country's poverty and limited opportunities, even for the well-educated, who often earn less than $80 a month, are undermining confidence in the future and forcing many couples to re-evaluate traditional gender roles.

"Men don't want the responsibility because of financial reasons," Aziz said. "They are more accepting of career women. Eventually they know they'll need someone to help them financially."

She doesn't want to be single forever. Sitting beneath a chandelier in her living room, Aziz speaks of hospitals, why surgeons tend to be men and the gap she feels at the day's end.

"I believe I'm missing something," she said. "I need to have children and a family. It's emotional, instinctual. You need other parts of life, not just work. But I never obsessed about it, never thought you had to run after it. I always believed (finding the right man) should be spontaneous. Some people think this is silly."

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