Winner of the 2013 Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies Journal’s Book Award

11/8/12 — Reviewed by Times Higher Education
1/20/13 — Reviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books
5/23/13 — Reviewed by London School of Economics Review of Books

Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith and Progress (University of Chicago Press: 2012).

In 2005, while I was conducting field research in Jordan, the World Bank released a “gender assessment” of Jordan.  In that assessment women’s education and development was framed as paradoxical because education for women had not led (or not led fast enough) to the gendered transformations that organizations like the World Bank assumed would flow from women’s education, namely smaller families and increased waged labor for women.  Having just spent seven months in a girls high school in Jordan conducting ethnographic research, this struck me as a very limited way in which to view women’s education and its significance.

Gendered Paradoxes is a book about the lives of a group adolescent girls and their families as they work to make sense of their own lives and education.  Education as I examine it in this book is a social space–the space of the school.  It is a state-led project to develop young women and create loyal citizens.  And it is a global discourse about what women should be and become.  Most importantly, however, it is the everyday experience of young women, and their families, working to make better lives for themselves — to be secure, happy and respected.  These lives are far from paradoxical but share the uncertainties that many lives do.