Life for women in Egypt is a portrait of contrasts. Wealthy women are more likely to have careers and participate actively in government, academics, and the social system to affect change. While middle-class women often enjoy the advantages of advanced education, most rely on their husbands for financial security. Ironically, women who live in poor rural areas have more flexibility in some spheres of life. Because poor women often work outside the home to earn an income, they have access to resources outside of marriage that middle- and upper-middle-class women may not have.
     Two sobering threads run through this mosaic of Egyptian women’s lives: Approximately 97% of all women experience the practice of female genital cutting (FGC), and roughly one-third are subjected to domestic violence.
     Kathryn Yount, an associate professor in the RSPH Hubert Department of Global Health and in Emory’s Department of Sociology, has been studying these issues for more than a decade. She found her life’s passion as an undergraduate volunteer in a shelter for women and children. There she discovered that health was a prerequisite for women to live their lives as productive members of family and society.
     Her interests eventually led her to Egypt. Working with collaborators at the American University in Cairo, Yount examined how women’s low status in Egyptian households may lead to poorer health, less health care, and higher mortality among girls. The study, which formed the basis of her doctoral research, encompassed 3,000 homes in Minya, a poor, densely populated region on the rural west bank of the Nile.
     Yount’s ensuing research in Egypt was so politically charged that more than once her study was nearly pulled from the field. Such roadblocks only strengthened her resolve to improve women’s health, sometimes with surprising results.
     Two years ago, Yount testified in Atlanta about the genital cutting of female minors, a common practice in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and in immigrant communities around the world. Yount’s expertise contributed to the passage of a 2005 Georgia law that defines FGC as a criminal act.
     “It was exciting to have the opportunity to describe these practices, their causes, and implications,” she says. “I was not expecting my research in Egypt to have such direct policy implications in the United States.”
     In a current study with the American University in Cairo, she is focusing on the roots of domestic violence in Egypt. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study asks a number of questions: Why do women experience marital violence? Is it because they’ve experienced violence in childhood? Is violence more or less common if the couple is poor, if the woman depends economically on her husband, has several dependent children, lives with her in-laws, or lives near kin? Her findings will add to existing global data on domestic violence against women, with the goal of raising awareness in Egypt and internationally to help implement policy change.
     The threefold project builds on 25 years of national Demographic and Health Survey data, which most recently included questions on domestic violence. In the field work portion of Yount’s study, interviewers will re-administer these questions on domestic violence to women of reproductive age. These interviews will help her understand the extent to which women talk openly and truthfully about their personal experiences. “In some parts of Egypt,” Yount explains, “60% of women in this age range have not been to school.” The acceptability of talking about domestic violence may differ among these women compared to those in the U.S.
     In Yount’s study, women and men also will be asked to describe what they consider to be acceptable and unacceptable ways of treating women. Understanding both views will help Yount and others change how men regard women and how women regard themselves.
     “There’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest that men tend to hold more conservative values than do women about gender relationships in marriage and family life,” she says. “Even educated men probably will be slower to change than will educated women.”
     Child maltreatment, experienced as FGC by Egyptian girls, often precedes domestic violence in marriage, according to her study. Women who did not experience FGC are at lower risk of violence. These women are less likely to enter marriages that accept violent treatment of women and more likely to object directly and leave those marriages. “Early life experiences often can socialize women to see maltreatment as normal,” says Yount.
     Fortunately, change is under way. In her Minya study during the mid-1990s, Yount discovered a substantial decline in FGC among the daughters of women in that study. She attributes this decline to the efforts of a grassroots Christian organization, which seeks to improve the treatment of women through community development projects that involve men and women.