Class and Patriarchy as Competing Paradigms for the Study of Middle Eastern Women

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Abstract
During the last nine years, while Western feminists were directing critical attention to what they described as “the curious courtship,” the “unhappy marriage,” and the “uneasy hyphen between marxism-feminism,” Western students of Middle Eastern women were pushing the field toward a serious consideration and adoption of Marxian social and economic theories. In two very important articles, Nikki Keddie and Judith Tucker argued that the field can expand its understanding of the different worlds of women by studying their roles in production and social reproduction. This new materialist approach promised to overcome what both said was a serious idealist bias in the literature that derived the status of Middle Eastern women from the major Muslim religious and legal texts and/or relied on the culturally biased Western/Orientalist conceptions of these women.