![]() "You go for a job, and your competition's a woman who's smarter than you are, who's better educated than you are and who's worked harder than you have," says Amar Captan, a Lebanese business student. For some, globalization has meant transnational careers. ![]() Cheap air fares have made it easier for Arabs to travel abroad. The Internet and satellite TV have flooded Arab countries with sights and sounds unimaginable even three years ago. A constitutional court in Kuwait agreed last month to hear women's petition for the vote. Last year Qatari women gained the right to vote some even ran for office-though none won. Since the Beijing World Conference on Women five years ago, women across the Arab world have become better educated, more aware of their rights and readier to use them. Elite Arab women have had access to good education for centuries what's changed in the last generation is the rising standard of education for ordinary Arabs-men and women alike. One thing is sure: the old Middle East-where men worked and women were shrouded from the outside world-is fading fast. Egyptian women work as managers in multinational corporations, but need permission from a male member of the family to travel. Kuwait boasts women economists and professors-none of whom have the right to vote. In Saudi Arabia, women can own businesses-but are banned from driving to them. How to compare a Jordanian Internet entrepreneur with a Yemeni housewife? A Christian Palestinian poet with a Muslim shepherdess in the Atlas Mountains? As Arab societies try to balance traditional values with modernizing economies, women's rights and roles can seem schizophrenic at times. Coming up with a profile that would fit all women in all 21 Arab League countries is virtually impossible. I can do anything here."ĭiscovering the new Arab woman on a single strip of Beirut coast is complex enough. "But now we've got the same freedoms as in the States. "Before, you'd just sit home to cook, clean and raise babies," says Ghada Ajami, who recently moved to Beirut from Michigan to expose her kids to Arab culture. Talk to the veiled women on the beach, and they'll tell you that their freedom has grown considerably. George's set may fly to Paris to stock up on Chanel, but that doesn't mean they work. A "modern" Arab woman isn't necessarily one in Western clothes, and a veiled woman isn't always oppressed. Or is it? In today's Middle East, appearances can be deceiving. ![]() It's easy to tell which women are traditional Arabs and which are more modern. George's Yacht Club, well-oiled young women in bikinis lounge poolside, some with lips and breasts perfected by Lebanon's finest plastic surgeons. Their mothers picnic on the sand, chatting and sucking on hookah pipes. On a crowded beach in Beirut, girls wearing head scarves and track suits splash in the waves.
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