The Women`s World

Much like the practice of belly dancing, henna is considered to be women’s art and activity, shrouded in mystery behind closed doors in the world of women – inside the home. The theme of women and their relationships with each other, and with men, regarding their crafts and how they use them engulfs much of the women’s behaviour. Much of their lives are dependent on the men, predominantly the head male of the house hold. This extends into the outside world, beyond the home, which is considered the man’s world. “Patriarchal hegemony does not exclude the existence of sectors or tactics that permit greater or lesser freedom, nor do all women experience it in the same way,” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 13).  This pillar of social structure is being challenged however due to a new market of income opening with the influx of tourists into Morocco, particularly with relation to tourist sector henna. Women have begun to extend themselves beyond their place indoors, into the outside world, which is causing some shifts in the social power of gender within Morocco.

“…the presentation of culture ‘is a communicative medium to shape reality, to construct it in order to achieve specific ends’ (Peteet 1993:52).” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 47).

Henna on the street

In Morocco, much like everywhere, spaces contain meaning regarding how they are used, who has access to them, the rituals performed in them, the economic and social contexts that are embedded in them, and how all of these connects to other’s lives. “The house and the street are not just places however, but metaphors or reference points that orient Moroccan women’s self-presentation through speech and action,” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 46). The repetition of these actions in these places will reinforce these metaphors, such as what is said between people, the mannerisms necessary to communicate depending on location, and other symbols like dress. This has been carefully and strategically orchestrated in Moroccan culture, so that a woman may not be able to exist outside of these constructs without risking her reputation. For instance, for a woman to be on the street too much without reason would call into question her actions. Occasionally, when ends cannot be met and more money is needed to feed the family, women will resort to prostitution, a transaction that typically happens on the street, and ruins reputations (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 65). If a woman is spending too much time on the street, people would assume something like prostitution, ruining a woman’s future prospects in a whole host of areas.

In the past several decades, tourism has been increasing in Morroco, and with the high influx of tourists coming to Morocco, those outside of the domestic economic sector have been reaching into the pool of international visitors for monetary opportunity. However, those who have access to this pool of income are almost exclusively one group of people; the “local actors who benefit most are male” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 62). This is mostly through the gendering of jobs, and those who have access to interact with the unknown tourists. Women have been taking to the streets of Morocco to offer their stills as henna artists, selling take-away-souvenirs to tourists in the form of henna designs, in order to make some money.

However, it is more difficult than simply setting up a stall in the plaza and calling tourists over with the promise of a personalize design. Women are typically not able to speak with individuals outside their own kin group, which is often symbolized by the way they dress. One way women who are moving to the tourist sector to find work are working around this is by adopting religious idioms, such as the veil or the hijab (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 56). This way, they may avoid some negative attention they may attract for working outside the home, by adopting a more formal style of dress. However, if henna is to be sold to a tourist, the women need to do more than dress conservatively; they need to interact with the tourists and make the henna art readily available.

Beautiful henna on her left hand

Tourists rarely ever want to spend an enormous amount of time in one place while travelling; they have a limited amount of time in the area and want to make the most of it by seeing all they can. A henna artist could invite a tourist to their home to perform henna; however that is almost worse than working on the street in the open, because now someone outside the kin group is in the home and this could be easily misunderstood to be prostitution. Having been a tourist in several countries where I did not speak the language, I noticed most other tourists will stick to the main pathways where the streets are wide and there seems to be a lot of activity. Women who wish to work in the tourist henna sector must move to these public areas in order to interact with the tourist to make a sale. Thus, due to tourists rarely ever being invited into a private home, or leaving the main streets, the henna artists are forced to go where the tourists are.

“Female artisans, operating from a weak base and lacking institutional power, aim to expand and solidify their use of public space. Socially constructed space is engaged here as both a context that reveals power relations and structures women’s actions and as a process in which they participate, as their actions alternately reinforce and resist it (Low, 1996; Erdreich and Rapoport, 2006),” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 56).

The enormous shift in Moroccan culture, from one where men domimate the working work, to one where it is more likely to find men and women in the same work place, doing different jobs, but behaving in a similar fashion in order to make the most of the economic opportunities opening up with so many tourists wandering through the streets and urban areas of Morocco. This can be discomforting to some people because even if a woman was in the most moderate of costumes, her mere presence in a market or a wide main street challenges the traditional placement of women’s work, which is traditionally in the home. By placing women in an outdoor setting, and have them behave in a businesslike manner like the men, it disrupts patterns of gender.

Tourist sector henna artists will challenge additional gender structures by applying henna to the bodies of men, removing another symbol that is particular to the art of henna – which is typically exclusively applied to the bodies of women. “The hadith show henna on the hands and feet as distinctively feminine” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 31). I find it odd that henna would be considered exclusive to women as it had originally been meant as a form of cooling the body because it had chemical properties where, if applied to the palm of your hand and the soles of your feet, the wearer would feel cooler than they really were. It would hopefully be assumed that this form of air conditioning would be available to both sexes, and in some parts of the world it is, but in Morocco it is primarily a women’s activity. Perhaps, because of the elaborate artistic and craft attributes which are culturally primarily considered to be women’s work, it had been handed over to the women as a pass time which evolved into and included ceremonial practices and symbolic implications with the style, placement, and application of henna. Whatever the case may be, the placement of henna on the bodies of men challenge the ceremonial and gendered meanings of henna practice.

Women in the work force

                The placement of women in the streets of Morocco challenges gender structures in Moroccan culture, such as the role women play in the economic market of Morocco, where their ‘place’ is in home or the outside world, as well as which gender may wear henna. With tourists visiting cities like Marrakesh, women are taking to the streets in order to dip into this economic opportunity to help support themselves and their families. The presence of women on the streets, behaving in manners of masculinity, and acting as an active participant in the Moroccan job market changes the way Moroccans see the role women play in their own social setting. Tourist sector henna has been criticized quite a bit throughout this blog so far, but in some ways it has brought a bit of equality to the streets of Morocco, allowing women to move around more freely than they had before.