Studies of domesticity in the Middle East are in
part about encounters between European and North
American colonial and missionary projects and
local communities in the settings of schools, women’s
organizations, and the periodical press. Unlike
Afghanistan, Iran experienced considerable British,
French, and especially American missionary influence
in education. However, cultural encounters between
missionaries and Iranians often inspired struggle
over the content and meaning of domesticity.
American missionary notions of domesticity
were based on belief in the “dignity of labor” of
wife and mother as an ingredient of the modern,
hygienic, scientifically ordered household, nation,
and society. For example, the American Presby-
terian girls’ school Iran Bethel, established in 1895,
introduced a course called “Household Arts.” The
curriculum included domestic science subjects such
as designing and decorating a home, plumbing and
water-gathering, heating, lighting, washing clothes,
cooking, and sewing. Missionaries considered this
type of education vital for modern Iranian woman-
hood and believed that it also secured the mission-
ary influence on the Iranian household. However,
the earliest students at Iran Bethel were from Iran’s
most wealthy and prominent families and were not
accustomed to performing housework, which they
viewed as best left to their servants.
Even though Iranian students initially resisted
missionary models of domestic science education,
reformers and certain segments of elite Iranian
society embraced important notions of scientific
domesticity. Feminists of the early twentieth cen-
tury in particular used it to stake their claim in the
educational and public arenas. As adherents of
nationalist ideology, they argued that if Iran were
to become a modern nation, the Iranian family, and
particularly women who raised children, needed
access to proper education and training. The Iran-
ian women’s journals Dànish(Knowledge, 1910–11)
and Shukùfah(Blossom, 1914–18), founded by
female editors Dr. Kahhal and Muzayyan al-
Saltanah respectively, ≠âlam-i Nisvàn(Women’s
universe, 1921–34), edited by graduates of Iran
Bethel, and the Afghan women’s journal Irshàd-i
Nisvàn(Women’s guidance, 1921–5), established
by Queen Íurayyà, published articles on childcare,
household affairs, and increased rights for women.
Domestic science education and elite women’s
writings had a concrete impact on Iranian and
Afghan households. In the twentieth century, the
rise of the urban middle classes, especially in Iran,
led to the transformation of scientific domesticity
into actual domestic practices.
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K. Transberg Hansen (ed.), African encounters with
domesticity, New Brunswick, N.J. 1992.Jasamin Rostam-KolayiSub-Saharan Africa: Hausa SocietiesOccupation of domestic roles, engagement with
domestic labor, and association with domestic
spaces of the home are central to the identities of
Muslim Hausa women in Northern Nigeria. The
identities of millions of ordinary rural and urban
Muslim Hausa women are formed largely through
their lived experiences of daily domesticity. The
lives of women, especially adult married women,
are strongly rooted in the domestic sphere, prima-
rily via their occupation of the domestic space of
the gida(courtyard home) within which they per-
form the daily tasks of domestic labor. Time use
studies show that for both rural and urban Muslim
Hausa women much of their time is occupied with
domestic tasks. Dominant ideologies and prevail-
ing socioreligious discourses also express, reflect,
and ensure that women’s place is in the home bear-
ing and rearing children, preparing food, washing
clothes, and engaging in the myriad of tasks essen-
tial to the daily and generational reproduction of
the family, community, and society. With respect to
the construction of Hausa women’s identities via
domesticity, the widespread practice of wife seclu-
sion is one of its most fundamental aspects.
For many married women seclusion in the do-
mestic sphere is part of the Hausa cultural environ-
ment today and dates back to the early nineteenth