CAIRO — She sits in a cafe, her laptop unfolded, while at the next table a young man in a suit discreetly reaches for the hand of his fiancee, who blushes and laughs against a window in the night.
The couple whisper, almost conspiring. Mai Hawas knows what that's like. She has been engaged twice, but neither romance lasted -- one man was preoccupied with work, the other consumed with money. Now she's 31 and unmarried, a state that bemuses her parents and leaves Egyptian society, with its customs and curious eyes, wondering whether there is something wrong with this quiet woman in the embroidered head scarf.
Hawas' passions are poetry, photography and her job as an architectural engineer at a firm sketching new designs for Mecca's holy shrine complexes. These, not a man, give her identity. She wants a family, but like an increasing number of educated, professional women in Egypt, she craves a wider degree of independence than men are willing to grant and cultural expectations traditionally allow.
"Getting married and having a family is natural," Hawas says. "We all need someone to trust. I don't want to live alone. But I also don't want to give up who I am.
"The men I meet are educated, yes that's true, but some Egyptian men don't like 'girls' to talk about politics and culture, or to argue with them about ideas. But I have my own personality. I don't need someone else forming my mind."
Marriage here is steeped in negotiations between families over dowries, money and who buys the couch and who the nightstand. But increasingly career-oriented women, along with Egypt's high inflation rate and low wages, have complicated the scenario. Marriage now is often postponed by young men whose bank accounts are too small to win over a fiancee's family, and by independent women less inclined to wed a rich man solely for children and security.
Economic uncertainty has slid into national neurosis; Egyptian nerves are riled these days as many women, either by desire or necessity, attempt to bypass conventions. Literacy rates for women have risen, and a United Nations study found that increasing numbers are joining the labor force, accounting for 31.4% of workers in 2005, up from 18% in 1996.
The single, professional woman is "a phenomenon that's definitely been increasing" across the Middle East, said Madiha El Safty, a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo. "These women feel they have a number of things to offer, and to give up, so they've become selective and very choosy. This is especially true among the upper class, but there is still great pressure on women in the lower and middle classes to marry young."
