Daily Star - Western Educated Women Caught In Clash Of Cultures

BEIRUT: Two weeks before she was due to leave for the United States to start a master’s degree, 23-year-old Nadia found herself standing at the top of the stairs of her family home in the Lebanon’s Chouf mountains shouting to her mother that no, she was not coming down there. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, Nadia relented and marched downstairs, snatching up a tray of sweets and delivering them to the patio, where her father and cousins were chatting with a man who wanted to marry her. Days before, while Nadia was returning from the US Embassy after picking up her study visa, she had received a call from her cousins, who began telling her about a handsome, wealthy man who was looking for a wife. Now she sat in silence while her potential suitor made small talk with her family. When the man finally left, Nadia was both irritated and amused. In her own eyes, she was a student, a woman on her way to earning a post-graduate degree. But to her family in Beirut, she was an unmarried woman in need of a husband. Four years later, now a PhD student in the United States, she returned home for the summer and struggled to adjust to life in Lebanon. She also wondered if she could ever call Lebanon home again. “In the US I got used to living alone and doing things by myself,” she said. “In Lebanon, your family and the community have expectations of you, like calculating when I should be getting married and watching closely to see if I am thinking about it. It’s tiring.” Nadia’s mom and dad are like thousands of Lebanese parents who sent their village-raised daughters to school at Western-style universities in Lebanon’s swinging capital, Beirut, or off to Europe, Canada, or the US. Most expect their daughters to come home as the same people, only with degrees. But many of these young women are returning to their villages with radically different ideas about marriage, sex and motherhood. “When I go back to my village, people cannot imagine my thoughts,” 20-year-old Reem said over coffee at a Beirut cafe popular with foreigners. “The people in the village and I are outwardly the same but inwardly very different.” Reem is from a conservative area in southern Lebanon, but she is studying literature at the American University of Beirut. Her liberal education has inculcated a very different set of values than those adhered to by the people in her village, where wearing the wrong outfit out (or going out at all) is enough to set tongues wagging. “I wasn’t allowed to go out in the evening for fear of what the neighbors might think,” Reem said. “People in the village would give their opinions to our father about the way we dressed or the way we acted. Being out at night or dressing a certain way could give the wrong impression and would hurt our family’s reputation.” Now, Reem works in a coffee shop in a hip Beirut neighborhood. Her attitudes about sex and marriage more closely resemble those of most European or American women than those of the women in the village where she was raised. But she still feels the pull of her past. While working late into the evening, her phone rang. It was her dad, wanting to know what she was doing. When she said she was working, he asked, “Why so late?” Reem sighs. “Seeing the life of my family is like watching an old Egyptian movie. They just talk about the news in the village,” she said. “I would be suffocated if I had to live their lives.” Though Lebanon has always been more liberal than many of its Middle Eastern counterparts when it comes to telling women which segments of society they may occupy, traditional values that emphasize a woman’s purity before marriage and a woman’s place in the home still reign supreme. This has left some observers skeptical about the power of education to change Lebanese attitudes toward women’s roles in society and within the family. These contradictions have rendered Lebanon a bipolar society where Western modernity is pitted against the traditional values of the surrounding region; a place where a Lebanese woman with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne might, upon her return home, contemplate hymen reconstruction to make herself more marriageable for men in her village. And although education levels are increasing among women in Lebanon, they still comprise only around one third of the Lebanese workforce and are rarely represented in positions of power. Yet the number of women in the workforce is growing, albeit slowly, and 2004 saw the first women Cabinet ministers in Lebanon’s history. Even more important, yet harder to quantify, are the heated arguments that are now taking place in households around Lebanon between young women and their parents. Armed with new expectations about their destinies, these women are resisting the powerful pull of the life their family, community and religious leaders expect them to lead. Indeed, more and more Lebanese women are insisting that higher education and a career is worth pursuing, no matter the price, even if the price is reproach from one’s community and family members. “My family always asks why I am not married yet, as if studying for my PhD in the US was selfish and greedy,” 28-year-old Sabine said. “It affects me when I come back here.” Sabine and two of her friends shared many of the same concerns about what life is like in Lebanon for well-educated young women, and they all agreed that higher education dims their prospects for marriage to many Lebanese men. But that’s a risk that they’re willing, maybe even eager, to take. “Once you sign on to start your PhD you’re basically signing off any marriage proposal from a typical guy in Lebanon,” said Maya, a Lebanese Christian from a village in southern Lebanon. All three enjoyed the freedom their education has allowed and were reluctant to return home for good. When asked what would have to change in Lebanon for her to want to come home permanently, Myriam, another PhD student, thought for a moment. “Lebanon needs a Woodstock.”