Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity

It is widely held today that classical Islamic law frees wives from any obligation to do housework. Wives’ purported exemption from domestic labor became a talking point among Muslims responding to Orientalist stereotypes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” by the late nineteenth century, and it has been a prominent motif in writings by Muslim feminists in the United States since the 1980s.

In Wives and Work, Marion Holmes Katz offers a new account of debates on wives’ domestic labor that recast...