Paper short abstract:

In Jordan, women's increased engagement in public life is considered a hallmark of progress. This paper explores how this equation of women working with progress has created, and problematised, a temporality of the home that is considered separate from that of the world outside the home.

Paper long abstract:

How do conceptions of past and present attach to the spaces and practices that are the stuff of ordinary everyday life? In Jordan, the idea of development—economic, social, and otherwise—is closely associated with women's engagement in the public sphere through work, education, or politics. Accordingly, "development" and "progress" are associated with women working outside of the home (Adely 2009, 2012) and "tradition" and even "backwardness" associated with women's work inside the home. This paper explores how this particular valuing of work as a future-oriented practice has reconfigured the space and time of the home and encouraged women to cultivate a specific kind of fantasy about their life outside the home. Since development has not alleviated women of their responsibility for housework, most women remain tied to their home responsibilities in important ways, but the configuration of domestic labour as something that contributes nothing to Jordan's progress and the time of the home as separate from this forward march of time makes this commitment problematic. In this context, the idea of egalitarian marriages where both spouses contribute to cooking, cleaning, and childcare prevails as a fantasy against which reality is harshly judged. This paper explores how the valuing of one practice with reference to its temporality—women working outside the home being equated with progress in this case—has knockon effects for the temporality and valuation of other practices, like housekeeping, and the fantasies that accompany such a temporal structure.