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Women, Work, and the idea of the Islamic city in Colonial Morocco
Abstract
This paper examines the regulation of Moroccan women domestic servants in colonial Morocco from the mid-1930s to 1952. These dates encompass a nearly two-decade controversy about the freedom of Moroccan Muslim women to move and work in the colonial city. Both Muslim and Jewish women’s bodies were the site of colonial intervention, with French Protectorate authorities passing numerous decrees and municipal orders about where and how women could earn a living and reside. Muslim and Jewish women, however, were not monitored and regulated in the same ways, but rather regulations on their bodies were influenced by French and Moroccan Muslim elite views of urban space and the role of women within that space. The idea of an archetypal “Islamic city” was a critical to early twentieth-century scholars of the urban Middle East and North Africa, but it neglected the presence and influence of religious minorities on the city’s physical and cultural landscape. In this paper, I analyze how the colonial state attempted to protect the concept of a pure “Islamic city” by attempting to keep Moroccan Muslim women from inhabiting and working in the mellah, or Jewish quarter, of Moroccan cities, where a growing number had taken up employment as domestic servants in Jewish households. I focus specifically on Marrakesh—home to the largest mellah in Morocco—but draw on examples from Casablanca, Meknes, and Mogador as well. In these cities, I ask why Muslim women were subject to tighter controls on their movement and employment than Jewish women were. How did Moroccan and French elites cooperate on these issues? Using Protectorate documents, petitions from Moroccan notables, and colonial-era periodicals, I trace the debate over women’s work through a 1941 formal ban on Muslim women in Jewish homes to the 1952 abrogation of the original law. I show how restrictive measures coincided with broader intercommunal tensions in Morocco and elsewhere in the French empire, and how these were brought to bear on Muslim women’s livelihoods.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries