Women’s Agency in the Face of Symbolic Violence in the Middle Class

Symbolic violence is a type of violence against women, in which violence has come out of the obvious and physical aspects and has become secret and symbolic.

This study is a qualitative study based on the Grounded theory of 15 deep interviews among educated women in Mashhad city.

20 main categories and one core category were extracted from data encoding in this study. The concept of “Women’s agency in the face of symbolic violence” was called the core concept. And other categories include the involvement of husband’s relatives, Subjective orientation of spouse’s marital activity, Instability in norms of marriage life, Accessibility of Supplements, Accessibility of complementary supplements, Increasing awareness among women, Socio-economic equality as the causal condition; Also the persistence / shakiness of family life, the perpetuation / descent of women in the family, the level of domestic violence and the calm / confusion of the family environment As a consequence, data from this research were extracted.

Middle-class women with resources such as public and university education, and better access to financial resources, social protection, and legal authority have made it impossible for their husbands to realize the potential for overt and direct violence. But a more subtle and covert form of violence is experienced by women. In the meantime, there is a kind of feminine management and agency in women, which is cleverly designed to eliminate or at least alleviate the symbolic violence in the field of married life, so that it minimizes costs for their husbands.