In Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity, Marion Holmes Katz addresses a theme in the legal literature of the Islamic medieval Middle East that began to appear in the 9th century and never relented. Muslim jurists seem to have paid much attention to the question of whether wives owe domestic labor to their household and its members, and in particular to their husbands. The book engages the theme with an introduction of thirty-eight pages, practically an independent chapter, and in individual chapters, each exploring the same topic in early Malikī texts and in one of four jurists: al-Māwardī (d. 1058), al-Sarakhsī (d. 1096), Ibn Qudāma (d. 1223), and Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328). The very long introduction covers multiple subjects related to Islamic law and ethics in Western scholarship in an attempt to create the framework of Islamic normativity, into which the discussion of the specifics of women’s domestic labor is inserted. Using her considerable expertise in Islamic jurisprudence, the author draws on different legal contexts and interpretations as she examines each jurist’s view and the treatment each devoted to the topic in minute detail. In spite of chronological, legal, and locational variations, the jurists’ analyses of wives’ domestic labor are similar. They all address the subject through one common theme, that of men and women’s property rights in marriage, and once brought together, their arguments enable us to sense the historical issue that unites them and offer a socio-economic analysis of the reasons and the timing of the debate.
In essence the debate undertaken by the jurists addresses one question surrounding wives’ housework, or rather that of female labor in general, which is whether the wife can claim hired labor to replace her in her domestic chores. The jurists, in discussing the various issues involved, consider the legal provisions that underline the legal framework of such a condition. The first involves the nafaqa, the legal commitment of the husband to provide maintenance to the household in marriage, which entails providing housing, food, and clothing—but does it also include a servant? The second legal principle is the wife’s duties in return. Is it only sexual availability? And what about breast feeding? Is it her duty to breast feed free of charge, or is she entitled to a payment, since the milk is her property, produced by her body, and hiring a wet-nurse is so common? What about the husband’s demand that his wife spins yarn to make cloth for him or the household? Jurists agree that she should not be working commercially to support the household, given the husband’s legal obligation to do so, but providing him with free spinning, for which she would otherwise be handsomely paid, also should not be considered commercial work. The continuous reference to wages alerts us to the possibility that financial compensation was the central issue of the debate, rather than unpaid domestic labor. Husbands may have the right to spinning, but women have the right to get paid for work. Here lies the difference.
The chronological presentation and the repetitious addressing of the same issues in the jurists’ discourse is significant since it signals that we are confronting an outcome of a persistent structural change. I suggest that an economics-based historical context might well explain the jurists’ conundrum. The context is to be found in the economic development occurring in the Middle East since the settlement by the Arabs and the end of an exogenous demographic shock brought by the Justianic Plague, 6th-9th centuries. The development of the industrial, or manufacturing, sector in the cities and the persistent labor shortages offered women entrance into labor markets, enabling wives to earn wages. Due to individual property rights, their earnings were protected, and they did not have to share them with their household. The obvious outcome of this development was that in many urban households, working wives could not devote time to housework. What we have in the jurists’ discussion of wives’ domestic work is the repercussions of that change. Resolving the problem by purchasing a slave for domestic labor, which is also continuously debated, was not a real solution. In previous research I calculated the average price of slaves in the 11th-13th centuries to be 22 gold dinars, close to Goitein’s average of 20 dinars (based on the Geniza documents), meaning that buying a slave was way too expensive for most households. The author does consider the possibility that the financial logic of owning a slave resided in some fundamental change in the economy that affected the status of women, but since this has not been sufficiently studied, she is reluctant to engage in some speculative interpretation.
The achievement of this study lies firstly in drawing attention to this debate, alerting historians to the presence of a major long-term issue surrounding women’s labor, which was not fully documented until now. Widespread wage payments to women suggests that we need to re-examine the likelihood that there was an impact on the household level that we could not explain earlier. Women having property rights resulted in independent financial income, which may have changed the household dynamics by creating a two-earners household. Secondly, tracing women’s property rights in economic terms provides insight into Islamic law as a women-friendly legal institution. The law enshrined the status of women as a stand-alone group of economic actors by creating channels of income distribution and wealth accumulation for women. Under the new legal property rights regime, income distribution within the household, wages, and other economic attributes affected gender equity and equality. The author also suggests that it was an issue of ethics, but accepting women’s work may depend on the reader’s discipline and previous inclinations. God may give a wife reward if she cooks and cleans, as well as earns for the household, but convincing women to do both under the guise of virtue is hardly the whole story. I am not sure that the jurists’ discourse could even be interpreted in this way.
Regardless of perspective, by providing intensive and wide coverage of this issue, the book lays out a major investigative tool into the interaction between law and economic realities. It portrays the legal content less as a theoretical framework, and more as a realistic approach to the dichotomy that economics and law were confronting together when change occurred.
Maya Shatzmiller is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.
Maya Shatzmiler
Date Of Review:
June 23, 2022