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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Libya
Index
The social setting of the family significantly affects the
circumstances of a wife. Until the discovery of petroleum--and to
a lesser degree until the 1969 revolution--conservative attitudes
and values about women dominated society. By the 1980s, however,
modifications in the traditional relationship between the sexes
were becoming evident, and important changes were appearing in the
traditional role of women. These varied with the age, education,
and place of residence of the women.
In traditional society, beduin women--who did not wear the veil
that symbolized the inferior and secluded status of women--played
a relatively open part in tribal life. Women in villages also
frequently were unveiled and participated more actively in the
affairs of their community than did their urban counterparts. Their
relative freedom, however, did not ordinarily permit their exposure
to outsiders. A sociologist visiting a large oasis village as
recently as the late 1960s told of being unable to see the women of
the community and of being forced to canvass their opinions by
means of messages passed by their husbands. The extent to which the
community was changing, however, was indicated by the considerable
number of girls in secondary school and the ability of young women
to find modern-sector jobs--opportunities that had come into being
only during the 1960s.
Urban women tended to be more sophisticated and socially aware,
but they were also more conservative in social relations and dress.
For example, unlike rural women, who moved freely in the fields and
villages, urban women walked in the street discreetly in veiled
pairs, avoiding public gathering places as well as social contact
with men. Among the upper class urban families, women fulfilled
fewer and less important economic functions, and their
responsibilities were often limited to the household. Greater
sexual segregation was imposed in the cities than in the
countryside because tribal life and life in farm villages made
segregation virtually impossible.
While women remained in the home, men formed a society
organized into several recognizable groupings. These consisted of
such coteries as school classmates, village or family work
associates, athletic clubs, or circles of friends meeting in a
cafe. In earlier times, the group might have been a religious
brotherhood.
Like all Arabs, Libyans valued men more highly than women.
Girls' upbringing quickly impressed on them that they were inferior
to men and must cater to them; boys learned that they were entitled
to demand the care and concern of women. Men regarded women as
creatures apart, weaker than men in mind, body, and spirit. They
were considered more sensual, less disciplined, and in need of
protection from both their own impulses and the excesses of strange
men.
The honor of the men of the family, easily damaged and nearly
irreparable, depended on the conduct of their women. Wives,
sisters, and daughters were expected to be circumspect, modest, and
decorous, with their virtue above reproach. The slightest
implication of unavenged impropriety, especially if made public,
could irreparably destroy a family's honor. Female virginity before
marriage and sexual fidelity thereafter were essential to honor's
maintenance, and discovery of a transgression traditionally bound
men of the family to punish the offending woman.
A girl's parents were eager for her to marry at the earliest
possible age in order to forestall any loss of her virginity. After
marriage, the young bride went to the home of her bridegroom's
family, often in a village or neighborhood where she was a stranger
and into a household where she lived under the constant and
sometimes critical surveillance of her mother-in-law, a
circumstance that frequently led to a great deal of friction. In
traditional society, girls were married in their early teens to men
considerably their senior. A woman began to attain status and
security in her husband's family only if she produced boys. Mothers
accordingly favored sons, and in later life the relationship
between mother and son often remained warm and intimate, whereas
the father was a more distant figure. Throughout their years of
fertility, women were assumed to retain an irrepressible sexual
urge, and it was only after menopause that a supposed asexuality
bestowed on them a measure of freedom and some of the respect
accorded senior men. Old age was assumed to commence with
menopause, and the female became an azuz, or old woman.
Data as of 1987
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