[In the following excerpt, Tucker evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Doing Daily Battle.]

Both of these books [Doing Daily Battle and Women of Marrakech, by Leonora Peets] belong to a new and expanding genre in Middle East women's studies in which women writers seek to capture women's daily lives by giving their interviewees a voice in the telling of their stories. This is insurrectionary literature that contests the “pervasive male discourse,” as Fatima Mernissi terms it, of Moroccan society. In exploring their ideas about love and marriage, work and leisure, the seen and the unseen, both authors make the women of their books come alive, so that we may recognize them as people whose oppression and lack of power neither blur their personalities nor still their tongues. …

Fatima Mernissi brings a radically different background to the task of giving women a voice [in Doing Daily Battle]. A Moroccan, she was born in 1940 into a middle-class home in Fez, “exactly,” she observes, “five-hundred meters from Karaouin University.” She continues, “One could not be better situated to benefit from our heritage and its advantages. Well, I was born there and I was raised by illiterate women who were not only physically confined but intellectually mutilated in the name of honor and a female ideal cherished by the male bourgeoisie …” She managed to make it to the university in Morocco; subsequently she received higher degrees in sociology in France and the United States. Urbane, articulate and well traveled, Mernissi also remembers her roots; much of her writing before this has been inspired with a sense of mission. In earlier books she explored the underpinnings of a gender system that oppresses Moroccan women, examining its Islamic and customary roots. In Doing Daily Battle she seeks to allow women themselves to challenge this system simply by talking about the reality of their lives.

The book is composed of interviews with eleven women. From the start we are strongly conscious of Mernissi herself, who reflects in the introduction on the complexities of the interview process. Her own questions often seemed incomprehensible or irrelevant to the women, so she tried, whenever possible, to let the interview flow where the interviewee chose. She tried, she writes, to give up control and cultivate empathy, an empathy based on her “strong sense of belonging to the world of illiteracy in which I was immersed until the age of twenty.” By and large she has succeeded. The women use a relatively unstructured narrative style to tell their stories: what is lost in clarity or focus is more than made up for by the authenticity of the voice. Mernissi herself is sometimes too present. Her fidelity to her texts as she has transcribed them can make for choppy passages in which she intervenes with a question every sentence. On the other hand, these interventions allow us a sense of the interview process, and, I think, help us identify with an educated and privileged woman's struggles to comprehend her very different sisters.

In part, Mernissi's interviewees discuss, as did Peets', their problems with men and with marriage, a key concern. Most of them are married off to men about whom they at first have little knowledge. Their pain is reminiscent of Peets' accounts. But Mernissi's interviewees conceive of marriage utterly differently from Peets'. They constantly make clear that marriage shouldn't be a mere fate but should measure up to their expectations. They want love and understanding and when they don't get it they aren't afraid to call the marriage a failure and press for divorce. Among these women polygynous marriage is rare, and marital problems are likely to be solved through separation.

Rabi'a, for example, was married to an older cousin, but her respect for him gradually waned. He took, she says, to seeing other women and coming home drunk. Their sex life deteriorated. He threatened her repeatedly with divorce. But it was she who finally decided she “had become allergic to his way of eating, of drinking, of walking, of laughing, of joking,” and it was she who demanded a divorce. Habiba, a female psychic, left a husband who mistreated her. Eventually she married a man who believed in her vocation and helped her in her intercessions with the spirits. While these women have been victimized by the gender system, we get a clear sense that they can and do fight back.

Indeed, Mernissi emphasizes that her interviewees don't see themselves as weak or helpless, but rather as “a race of giants doing daily battle against the destructive monsters of unemployment, poverty, and degrading jobs.” They work as field laborers, textile factory spinners, carpet knotters in workshops, and maids. They describe themselves not only as workers, but also as money managers who must make insufficient incomes stretch to provide food and shelter for their families. “Instead of drinking coffee with milk for breakfast,” says Tahra Bint Mohammad of her own complex strategies, “I drink tea, even though I don't like tea. We eat meat twice a week, we never eat sardines … In the afternoon, we never drink coffee. Doughnuts cost 80 centimes a pound, so we don't buy them. Fruit? Don't mention bananas or apples, we don't even buy oranges.” With such economies Tahra adds a little money each month to the house fund which, she hopes, will let her and her husband buy the house that will finally ensure them freedom from the threats of eviction and rising rents.

The opulent harim world isn't altogether absent from Mernissi's pages. Three of her older interviewees were raised in harims, and their accounts of the jealousies and intrigues of their youth are strongly reminiscent of the world Peets evokes. The seamier side of the harim is graphically illustrated in an interview with Mariam, the poor servant of a great household, who was made pregnant by her master. Because he refused to accept his responsibility, she tried to hide her pregnancy and finally gave birth secretly to a dead infant, sheltered in a sympathetic harim slave's room. “Then I took the child,” she remembers,

wrapped it in a towel, and carried it outside in my arms. I walked down to the river and threw it in. I had no choice. I slept for a few hours beside Selwa [the slave] until dawn. Then I started again, scrubbing other people's floors, doing their laundry, and serving them.

(p. 35)

The horror of this account is blunted by our sense that Mariam's world—a world where masters exercise unbridled power over slaves and servants—is a world of the past. The other interviews here suggest that the vast majority of Moroccan women are not victims of such relentless abuse; they are fully active in securing the best possible lives for themselves despite tremendous odds.

The differences in tenor in these two books reflect changing times. Peets' stories take place from 1930 to 1970, while Mernissi conducted her interviews in the 1970s and early 80s. Morocco itself has changed. And while the harim with all its trappings is all but vanished, Mernissi's book tells us it was never the quintessential Moroccan female experience. Both books also redress wrongs of perception. Arab women have been cast by writers, photographers and other Western “experts” as passive, silent and exotic victims. Their own culture has cast them as weak vessels. By allowing their subjects to speak for themselves, Peets and Mernissi help their readers understand how false such stereotypes are.