Impact of women's home-based enterprise on family dynamics:Evidence from Jordan

Within developing and disadvantaged economies, women’s self-employment has been identified as a tool to assist in alleviating poverty and empowering individual women. To explore these arguments, this article considers the experiences of Palestinian women who operate home-based enterprises within conservative patriarchal families. Empirically, we drew upon a study of 43 home-based female embroiderers, all members of the ‘1967 displaced Palestinian community’ now living in Amman, Jordan. From the evidence, it emerges that although these women make a critical contribution to family incomes, their entrepreneurial activities are constructed around the preservation of the traditional family form such that while some degree of empowerment is attained, challenges to embedded patriarchy are limited

The Paradoxes of Tunisian Women’s Liberation

This chapter introduces readers to the research which focuses on gender and work in Tunisia. The author’s own experiences are important to the research. This chapter describes the popular discourse of the already-liberated Tunisian woman and how it depicts women’s rights as stemming from Tunisian legal codes. The introduction introduces skepticism around the ways in which women’s rights can obfuscate the realities faced by many women in the labor force and in the family, the two social institutions that are most closely scrutinized throughout the book. Further, liberated Tunisian women are the subject of societal anxiety about women’s sexuality and power