The Nation and Its New Women The Palestinian Women&39s Movement, 1920-1948 [Paperback]

Though they are almost completely absent from the historical record, Palestinian women were extensively involved in the unfolding national struggle in their country during the British mandate period. Led primarily by urban, educated women from the middle and upper classes of Arab society, Palestinian women struggled against British colonialism and against Jewish settlement by holding a national congress, meeting with government officials, smuggling arms, demonstrating, and participating in regional and international conferences. This book is the first comprehensive historical study of the emergence and development of the Palestinian women's movement in this important historical period. Drawing from little-studied source material including oral histories, newspapers, memoirs, and government documents, Ellen Fleischmann not only shows what these women accomplished within the political arena, but also explores the social, cultural, and economic contexts within which they operated. Charting the emergence of an indigenous feminism in Palestine, this work joins efforts to broaden European and American definitions of feminism by incorporating non-Western perspectives.

Ellen L. Fleischmannis Assistant Professor of History at the University of Dayton.

This book is an important effort to tease out womens political consciousness in a particularly volatile colonial setting. . . . It adopts an explicitly feminist stance in its effort to demonstrate that women were able to assert a certain autonomy despite the repressive aspects of colonial rule and nationalist ideology. It also joins efforts to de-center notions of feminism from European and American experiences by defining an indigenous feminism in Palestine. The books most outstanding contribution is, perhaps, its use of oral histories to capture a lived reality unrecorded in documents. As a result, this study succeeds admirably in its stated project, the recovery of womens history in a filC(