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Modernizing Patriarchy: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Morocco by Katja Zvan Elliott (review)

Despite a substantial body of scholarship arguing otherwise, countries of the Middle East and North Africa remain for many the home of women’s oppression par excellence, the headscarf a metonym for patriarchy. Against this background, “women’s rights,” “women’s empowerment,” and other related concepts imply forceful normative assumptions about who wields power and who can exercise rights, and regional scholars focused on gender, including Lila Abu-Lughod (1990, 2013), Fida Adely (2009, 2012), and Saba Mahmood (2006), interrogate the assumptions that render some women “empowered” and others not. Katja Zvan Elliott’s Modernizing Patriarchy expands on critiques of normative modernizing agendas targeting women by examining the category of “women” as it functions in policy. She asks who, exactly, is targeted in efforts to bolster women’s rights—specifically, inMorocco’s 2004 reforms of the family code (Mudawwanat al-Usra, or Mudawwana)—and which women are excluded from those efforts. Elliott’s question is an important one, and her insistence on the pragmatics of women’s access to work, courts, and property rights under the reformed law illustrates the limitations of a reform that leaves unaltered thepatriarchal equationof “woman”with “marriedwomanwith children.” Elliott draws on interviews with Moroccan women activists, jurists, and development professionals to assess the changes that followed the 2004 reforms. The revised Mudawwana was widely praised for its progressive approach to personal status law, including divorce, marriage, and other family-related contracts, and its introduction of further legal protection for women. Elliott found that while theMudawwana does include some additional protections for women, their rights, and their property, women enjoy these protections only in the context ofmarriage, leaving divorced, unmarried, or widowed women vulnerable. She argues that the reform does little for unmarried women and even less todeconstruct thepatriarchalmodes of thinking that she considers the root of women’s