This thesis draws on 34 months of participant observation in a working-class neighborhood of Amman, Jordan to ask whether and how gender, specifically femininity, can serve as a framework for ethical self-cultivation. It describes the relationships between morality, progress, and gender in contemporary Jordan, where progress is viewed as important and inevitable but also amoral, and morality is associated with the past, which is the opposite of progress. Women are uniquely affected by these oppositions because they are expected to both preserve the morality of the past and embody progress, defined as maximizing their own self-interest through consumption, education, employment, and participation in public life. In this confounding context, women must be deliberate about how they choose to define and inhabit proper femininity, and the work of defining and inhabiting demands creative and productive engagement on their part. They respond by participating in a bounded public that not everyone can enter, and by making and maintaining a distinct temporality inside their homes that is distinguished from the temporality of urban life outside the home. They observe and work on their bodies in a complex and highly elaborated way, differentiating intuitive knowledge (authentic) from social knowledge (instrumental) and biological (medicalized), and they approach friendship as an arena for establishing boundaries between oneself and others, and for dealing with the social ramifications of the individualized approach to self-cultivation that is available to them.

Morocco is oftentimes praised by academics, development workers, and women’s rights activists as a trailblazer for the empowerment of women in the Middle East and North African region. Its reforms in the realm of family legislation and progress made in human development place the country at the helm of liberalising Arab Muslim-majority societies, even more so after the Arab Spring and Morocco’s peaceful transition to a ‘new’ constitutional order. However, a closer look at women’s rights discourses, legal reforms, its texts and implementation, and the public attitudes towards the enhancement of women’s rights reveals a less empowering situation. The purported goals of the Family Code, as the extolled document showcasing Morocco’s attempt at ameliorating (married) women’s rights, of ‘doing justice to women’ while ‘preserving men’s dignity’ mask the reformed law’s reconsolidation of patriarchal family relations. Many legal grey areas within this particular law, as well as clashing principles emanating from other laws such as the Penal Code, allow judges and the ʿaduls (religious notaries) to exercise discretion and apply the law as they see fit and, to a large extent, as it conforms to their and the community’s vision of the ideal moral order. Moreover, because ‘doing justice to women’ affects men’s and family’s honour, the project of the enhancement of women’s rights has had as a result retraditionalisation of family relations and hierarchical gender structures. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the status of educated single adult girls from provincial areas. They may be poster girls for the development community, but they are pitied by their own communities because they fail to become complete women––married (non-employed) mothers. The story of Morocco’s professed progress is a story of empowering its citizens, but one which does so on paper only. It is also a story which hides the salient details of poorly written reformed laws, obstructed access to justice, continuing widespread misogyny, material poverty and social marginalisation, and cohesive socio-economic programmes, which are rarely followed through.

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