Working women in Jordan: Education, migration, and aspiration By FidaAdely. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 207 pp.

Fida Adely's newest book, Working Women in Jordan: Education, Migration, and Aspiration, represents a kind of sequel to her previous ethnography, Gendered Paradoxes (Adely, 2012). In that previous work, Adely critically engaged with the supposed “paradox” of women's education in Jordan: while many women were pursuing education and achieving high results, the rate of female employment in the country remained low. Through a detailed and accessible ethnography of a girls’ school in northern Jordan, Adely demonstrated the limitations of this argument, highlighting the many different ways girls related to being in school and the complex values and experiences represented in education. Similarly, Adely's interlocutors in Working Women represent—and in some cases actually are—the future selves of the young women she worked with in the secondary school. Having observed girls in an education setting, she moves on to research with Jordanian women who migrate within the country for their education and subsequent employment. It is also a sequel in the sense that it further develops Adely's analytical approach: systematically picking up conventional wisdom about Jordanian women (whether arising from historical records, development discourse, or local stereotypes) and subjecting it to the test of in-depth qualitative research. The book offers a wealth of evidence that actual women's lives fail to conform to conventional wisdom. Adely makes this point by rigorously evidencing all her claims about working women in Jordan with first-person narratives gathered in her research. For the book, she interviewed 43 women who migrated for work, as well as 50 Jordanian men and women about marriage, and women engineers living in Amman. Further, Adely draws on interviews carried out with women born from 1931 to 1960 who left home for work, primarily teachers who traveled to rural areas to work. Research assistants Afaf al-Khoshman and Helen Ayoub contributed at different points in the project. In short, the work brings together well over 100 interviews with Jordanians, of different ages and backgrounds, who are all grappling with questions of education, migration, and aspiration, and the ways those forces reshape individual lives. In between the introduction, conclusion, and five chapters, Adely offers narrative interludes—three individual stories, one pair of stories, and one of a mother and two young women, all unrelated—that bring the reader into the topic in question with an expectation of nuance. Chapter 1, which discusses histories of education and migration in Jordan, opens with the stories of Elias and Hoda, two elderly people who describe their struggles to complete their education in mid-century Jordan. Adely uses the chapter's historical framing to work in relevant episodes from the history of Jordan, describing its state-building trajectory after independence in the 1940s and the role of education in these efforts. The interludes, which show Elias's disappointment at failing to complete his education and Hoda's life experience unfolding around her successful training as a teacher, underline Adely's point that education, migration, and aspiration are intertwined in Jordanian history. Chapter 2, addressing questions of migration, agency, and aspiration and their intertwining with notions of “waste,” “use,” and “worth,” opens with an interlude about Buthayna, a 27-year-old computer network engineer who had moved to Amman from the south for work. Adely presents a nuanced view of how women understand the value of their education and their contributions to the workforce, showing how the idea of their education “not going to waste” motivates their efforts to navigate a work environment in Amman that is often inhospitable. Chapter 3, addressing the realities of living in Amman away from family, opens with the story of Rania, an engineer from Irbid living in a girls’ dormitory in Amman. It discusses the women's experiences navigating Amman, a costly city where those from other parts of Jordan are stereotyped. It also highlights the challenge for women of living alone in a country where this is unusual; women and their families take pains to make this arrangement safe and morally unimpeachable. One solution to this challenge is the women-only dormitory, a mode of accommodation available in Amman where women live collectively and under rather strict regulations on curfew and visitors, which Adely discusses at length. Chapter 4 discusses how migration for work influences women's relationships with their natal family. In particular, it highlights the role of fathers as centers of power within families; it does so through stories in which the women's fathers supported or opposed their daughters’ migration—or did both at different times. The accompanying interlude contrasts the stories of Um Wijdan, Hannan, and Hala, all unrelated, showing different family dynamics around daughters’ migration. Adely's interlocutors poignantly articulate their positionality as they balance the conservative impulses of their parents—fear for safety, for security, for reputation—and their own sense of being part of a new and revolutionary generation of women. It also addresses the complicated nature of women's increased earning power, which often provides much-needed financial support to their natal families but can also upset established family dynamics, such as when a daughter outearns her father. Chapter 5 considers the relationship between migration, work, and marriage. Accompanied by an interlude about Sameera—a woman in her early 30s working and living in Amman who had resisted her family's attempts to nudge her toward marriage—the chapter puts the women's experiences in dialogue with a national discourse of a marriage “crisis.” Adely treats the idea of “crisis” with studied neutrality, pointing out that while 90 percent of Jordanian women do marry, that statistic means roughly one in 10 Jordanian women never marry. Adely shows how women resist certain norms around marriage, in particular the idea that they should “accept anyone who comes to ask for their hand” (p. 129). Her focus is on changing expectations of marriage as articulated by unmarried women, rather than lived experiences of marriage itself. The conclusion returns to Adely's primary theoretical intervention in the book, which draws on McNay (2000) to argue that women exercise creative agency in shaping their own life trajectories, responding to structural constraints without having their lives dictated by them. In one respect, Working Women differs substantially from Gendered Paradoxes, and that is methodological. While Adely's deep connections to Jordan, including her Jordanian origins and her previous research, give this book an ethnographic quality, it relies on interviews for data. The effect of this is that most of the material is delivered through extended quotes in the voices of participants rather than through the voice of the ethnographer. This is a notable strength of the book: its rigorous focus on individual stories demonstrates the power of qualitative data to shed light on social dynamics that quantitative measures (e.g., of women's employment in Jordan) fail to capture. It makes this intervention in a feminist way, although it is not announced as such. The book emphasizes women's voices throughout, from the interlocutors to the researchers to the theorists it engages. It would be an excellent addition to a course on qualitative methods or feminist scholarship. While the rigorous attention to women's professional trajectories in Amman, related in the women's own words, is a powerful intervention, this framing necessarily relegates other facets of experience to the background. Adely insists that women's life trajectories are relational, devoting an entire chapter to the way family dynamics shift after a daughter migrates to Amman for work. This point is well made and reflects a long-standing tradition of thinking relationally in the anthropology of the Middle East. Yet the dynamism of these relationships themselves is left implied. Place, similarly, is left to the imagination. While Adely attends to the differences between life in Amman and in the provinces, we as readers do not see this difference in any sensory terms. The book is also welcoming to those gaining familiarity with theory: Adely introduces concepts like neoliberalism, agency, and structures of feeling in clear language, and she links them to detailed examples from her interlocutors’ experience. Those teaching introductory courses in anthropology, Middle East anthropology, anthropology of education, or the anthropology of gender will be very well served by this book, and so will their students. Specialists in Jordan will also find much to value in it: the rich qualitative data and the comprehensive consideration of literature on Jordan make it a worthy text to keep close for the bibliography alone. Like Gendered Paradoxes, it is an important contribution to the anthropology of Jordan and the region.