Education Research Gender, Education and Development - A Partially Annotated and Selective Bibliography

structural ones in determining gender stratification in higher education. In Pakistan and
Iran, both with a high degree of gender stratification, Islamic fundamentalist policies
have been institutionalized despite the facts that in Pakistan the traditional elites are in
power but in Iran have been replaced. In Turkey the degree of gender stratification is
low, the state is secular, and the elites remain. In the three countries under
consideration, "the sacred/secular dimension consistently overrides class/structural
considerations", (p191).

MOGHADAM, Valentine M. (1993) Modernising Women: gender and social
change in the Middle East, Lynne Riener, Boulder.

This book, in the series Women and Change in the Developing World, has rapidly
found a place as essential reading on student booklists. It deals with social change in the
Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan and "its impact on women's role and status,
and women's responses to, and involvement in, change processes", (p.xiii). This is a
study from a sociological perspective and the author states in her preface -

"Myths and stereotypes abound regarding women, Islam, and the Middle
East. This book is intended in part to "normalise" the Middle East by
underscoring the salience of structural determinants other than religion. It
focuses on the major social-change processes in the region to show how
women's lives are shaped not only by "Islam" and "culture", but also by
economic development, the state, class location & the world system",
(p.xiii).

There are chapters on economic and political development, and Islamist movements,
and a whole chapter each is devoted to the women of Iran and Afghanistan in the two
detailed case studies.

Education is considered in the chapter dealing with 'Women, Patriarchy and the
Changing Family'. Moghadam points out that -

'The persistence or modernisation of patriarchy notwithstanding, the
processes of urbanization, industrialization, proletarianization, and mass
schooling - so important to the demographic transition, and the decline of
classic patriarchy in the West - are present in the Middle East", (p122).

Factors such as the development of groups of educated middle-class woman and also
the rapid growth in numbers of unmarried adolescents (as the age of marriage rises)
have had great impact. Education, says Moghadam, seems to be a more important
variable in changing the position and self-perception of women than is employment.

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