often residing in one room. No family has an income sufficient to meet 124 Book Reviews its needs; people are so poor they are afraid to accept hospitality because they are unable to repay it. Miserable though they are, their dreams are not of radical social change, but of advance within the existing system. In 1972, when the study was completed, the neighbour- hood had little good to say about Nasser, the former nationalist leadq-, or for his brand of socialism. His government like all others was regarded as corrupt and bureaucratic and the slum dwellers rarely availed themselves of the benefits of his public welfare programme: nobody believed that anything cheap or free could be trusted. They longed instead for what they saw as the stability and relative prosperity of life under British rule. But the focus of the book is not upon this - it is upon the lives of the women in these families. The slum areas with their narrow streets and decaying buildings are the women's territory and their flats are their domain. The men keep away, spending their time at work or in the cafes. It is unmanly to sit in the home with the women and children. The women are all, in the convehtional sense of the term 'housewives', dependent on a male wage earner and with little or no income- generating activity of their own. Their mornings are spent on house- work; the rest of the day and much of the evening is taken up with sustaining, forming or breaking the complex web of alliance with other women which is an integral part of the daily struggle to make ends meet. In most cases the only wage earners are husbands and fathers, as children generally leave home when they begin to work. For women to
often residing in one room. No family has an income sufficient to meet 124 Book Reviews its needs; people are so poor they are afraid to accept hospitality because they are unable to repay it. Miserable though they are, their dreams are not of radical social change, but of advance within the existing system. In 1972, when the study was completed, the neighbour- hood had little good to say about Nasser, the former nationalist leadq-, or for his brand of socialism. His government like all others was regarded as corrupt and bureaucratic and the slum dwellers rarely availed themselves of the benefits of his public welfare programme: nobody believed that anything cheap or free could be trusted. They longed instead for what they saw as the stability and relative prosperity of life under British rule. But the focus of the book is not upon this - it is upon the lives of the women in these families. The slum areas with their narrow streets and decaying buildings are the women's territory and their flats are their domain. The men keep away, spending their time at work or in the cafes. It is unmanly to sit in the home with the women and children. The women are all, in the convehtional sense of the term 'housewives', dependent on a male wage earner and with little or no income- generating activity of their own. Their mornings are spent on house- work; the rest of the day and much of the evening is taken up with sustaining, forming or breaking the complex web of alliance with other women which is an integral part of the daily struggle to make ends meet. In most cases the only wage earners are husbands and fathers, as children generally leave home when they begin to work. For women to