Making Girls into Respectable Women
Making Girls into Respectable Women
This chapter shows how schools, in many respects, are also “disciplinary institutions,” with the purpose of molding young minds and shaping young bodies. In Bawadi al-Naseem, teachers and parents alike conceived of school as an extension of the family—as an allied social institution that, in addition to teaching academic subjects, was entrusted with the upbringing or tarbiyya of young women, according to a set of generally shared moral values. Most school officials took this responsibility quite seriously, and given the time girls spent in school, gender lessons at school were salient dimensions of their upbringing. Monitoring the behavior of students at al-Khatwa was not limited to teachers, however, as students too worked to keep the behavior of their peers in check. Indeed, both students and educators were actively engaged in defining the terms of gendered respectability through their everyday talk and practices.
Keywords: disciplinary institutions, Bawadi al-Naseem, social institution, tarbiyya, gender lessons, al-Khatwa, gendered respectability
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