The women in Maragheh are thus confined within the boundaries of modesty and purity regulations. Their sexual potency is a threat to their modesty and must be jealously guarded. And their menstrual pollution is a threat to their personal piety and to the purity of the entire household. In sermons to women
during religious ceremonies and in women's conversations, my wife tells me, three topics are most frequent : wea ring the chador (veil), proper ritual bathing (ghosl), and proper ritual praying ( namaz). Thus modesty, purity, and essential religion are linked as the pillars of a proper life for women.
These broad cultural and social struct ures provide the framework for the complex of stresses surrounding female sexuality , which are voiced in terms of distress of the hea rt. The framework is not monolithic but a flexible idiom through which enormous individual, class and situational variations are ex pressed. It provides the structure within which the typical experiences of conflict and stress are generated, experiences we have outlined in the semantic network above. It is in this context that the complaints of heart distress and the desire to scream out by the woman in Case I can be understood as a protest at being segregated within the bounded confines of her courtyard and a desire to escape not merely the high walls surrounding her home but the even higher boundaries of modest behavior. A direct protest of norms of modesty and purity would of course be unthinkable , for they define membership in the social group. But the semantic network makes clear that an unspoken meaning of the woman's complaints of hea rt distress is the confinement entailed by social belonging in Maragheh.