Matrimonial Transactions and the Enactment of Class and Gender Difference Among Egyptian Youth

The literature from the Middle East and North Africa holds that many youth get stuck in a phase of “wait adulthood” while they struggle to afford the housing, furniture, appliances, celebrations, and jewelry considered necessary to establish a new marital union. In semi-structured interviews with 66 urban Egyptian men and women who were engaged to be married, I found that many marriages were postponed when young couples were unable to make the matrimonial transactions required by custom. However, I argue that normative barriers are no less important than material barriers to marriage in this context. Matrimonial transactions could not be reduced or forgone because they communicated important meanings related to class and gender. The celebrations and home visits that accompanied a new union involved conspicuous consumption, and actors strove to reproduce the material behaviors that predominated in their social class in order to secure a favorable position in the hierarchy of new couples. Matrimonial transactions were sharply gendered, and adherence to matrimonial norms and the ritualized situations that came with them signaled actors’ dedication to ideals of masculinity and femininity and the unequal roles they would occupy within marriage, at the same time that matrimonial exchanges built in safeguards for women within marriage. Young couples were keenly aware that failure to live up to the material standards of their social circles would be met with loss of face and negative judgements about their personal qualities, making such outlays appear to be compulsory rather than optional. At the same time, conforming to matrimonial customs resulted in greater symbolic capital, or social prestige.