Family Roles of Contemporary Palestinian Women

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This paper documents contemporary family roles and tests a multivafiate model predicting traditional family roles among Palestinian families living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The model utilizes married women’s education, their employment outside of the home, their belief and adherence to Islam, and their participation in the intifada as predictors of family roles. The measurement of traditional family roles was reduced to a single item regarding who provides the family income. Data was obtained in 1994 and 1995 from 6,253 Palestinian husbands and 6,024 wives. The results from the data reveal that the strongest factor predicting traditional family roles was women’s employment outside of the home. As expected, women who work outside of the home also help to provide income for the family. Adult Education Classes were mildly related to less traditional family roles, while higher levels of formal education was associated with more traditional roles (e.g., women with more formal education provided less of the family’s income). Women who were more religious were also more traditional in their family roles. Participation in the intifada was not associated with family roles. These factors accounted for only six percent of the variance in whether wives contributed to the family’s income. Thus, factors, such as women’s education and religiosity, did not have as strong a relationship in predicting family roles as anticipated. It may be that Western theories about modernization, including education, employment, and political involvement, have limited applicability in this particular non-western culture.