This book consists of a series of articles about the labor force participation of women in the Arab world. An introductory chapter by Moghadam is surprisingly weak since it considers primarily economic and demographic influences on women and work without giving serious consideration to cultural and societal factors. Many of the early chapters share this weakness, but the chapter on Yemen by Helen Lackner begins to take cultural factors into consideration and the chapter by Hussein Shakhatreh on Jordan is excellent. The chapter by Samih Boustani and Nada Mufarrej on Lebanon reports some hard-to-find data, but misses a key potential influence, the involvement of men in the conflict and the consequent increased need for women in the paid labor market. Informative charts summarizing data from the UNDP are also included.

This book presents a coherent and concise overview of women in the Middle East. Although written for young people, the language and facts are not dumbed-down in the least. Much recent research by such well-known authors as Fatima Mernissi, Bouthaina Shaaban, and Valentine Moghadam is presented in a form accessible to high school or even advanced middle school readers. Numerous pictures throughout the book help to support the authors' observations of how much variety there is in the conditions of women's lives in the region. Although the authors are both Americans, they have obvious deep connections to the Middle East, and their writing is neither strictly from the outside nor the inside- -it truly bridges cultures. The book is highly informative- -by spending just an hour or two reading this book, an adult reader could get a crash course in all of the main issues and major writers in this field. Recommended reading for anyone, young or old, travelling to the Middle East.

This book presents an encyclopedic overview of gender and employment in selected countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iran, and Algeria). The author gathers and analyses economic statistics from a wide range of published sources; she also includes data from her own fieldwork. The countries covered are each taken up in separate chapters (although Morocco and Tunisia form a joint chapter, as do Jordan and Syria).

Moghadam describes how the factors of educational attainment, cultural restrictions, and economics (need for family income, as well as the labor market) determine whether a woman can and will work. In the beginning chapters of the book (Morocco and Tunisia, Turkey), she gives a pointed emphasis to economic factors, perhaps because these can be firmly supported with economic data. By the time she describes Algeria, however, she seems to place more emphasis on cultural factors. Perhaps this shift from economic factors to cultural factors was the basis for ordering the chapters in the way she did, although she does not state this explicitly.

If Moghadam had included the richer Gulf states in the study, she might have been forced to address the competition between the factors more directly. In the richest Gulf States, women often attend school equally as long as men do, but their participation in paid employment is even lower than that of Jordan or Algeria. Thus it would seem that economic need and space in the labor market are both required in order to overcome cultural restrictions against women working outside of the home; education alone will not get a woman a job. If, however, the cultural restrictions are overcome by economic factors, then education may help a woman find work and security.