Daughters Of Tunis

by Paula Holmes-Eber

Published 12 August 2002

Daughters of Tunis is an innovative ethnography that carefully weaves the words and intimate, personal stories of four Tunisian women and their families with a statistical analysis of women's survival strategies in a rapidly urbanizing, industrializing Muslim nation. Delineating three distinct network strategies, Holmes-Eber demonstrates the "public" role of neighbourhood’s as informal social security systems, and the impact of women's education, class and migration on women's resources and networks. An engaging, warm, and oftentimes humorous portrait of Muslim women's responses to development, Daughters of Tunis is an exciting new approach to ethnography: merging the historically disparate methods of both qualitative and quantitative analysis.