Introduction: Early Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern Feminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms

The essays in this special issue of JMEWS deepen our understanding of the "woman question" in modern Middle East history and demonstrate the complexity of the struggles women faced as they organized locally, regionally, and internationally for reforms to improve women's status in society. Camron Amin, Kathryn Libal, and Orit Bashkin focus on the movement for women's rights in Iran, Turkey, and Iraq, respectively, while Charlotte Weber considers the aims of women organizing across national boundaries in the context of the Eastern Women's Congresses at Damascus in 1930 and Tehran in 1932. Ellen Dubois and Haleh Emrani present a speech by the primary organizer of these two conferences, available in English translation for the first time.

The term "woman question" compresses into two words a complex social, cultural, and political phenomenon that had at its center the issue of women's place in society. The woman question was central to debates over the form the nation-state should take after liberation from foreign occupation and the achievement of national independence. Issues such as how to modernize society without sacrificing indigenous culture or becoming un-Islamic were often debated in terms of women's role in the new nation-states. Would they have the right to vote, to be educated, to work outside the home? Some male reformers such as Qasim Amin of Egypt and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi of Iraq equated women's liberation with an end to veiling, seclusion, and polygyny.

The women's groups that emerged in the early twentieth century were liberal reformist in their goals and strategies, that is, they were not revolutionary. They worked to reform the state, not overthrow it, and they were secular rather than Islamic in their orientation. Their arena of struggle was the nation-state, or the incipient nation in the case of Iraq. Their demands included full citizenship for women through suffrage and reforms such as abolishing polygyny, raising the minimum age of marriage for females and males, extending the guardianship period of women over their children, curbing men's easy access to divorce, and expanding women's opportunities for education and employment. Because these groups were composed of middle- and upper-class women who sought alliances with Western-dominated international feminist organizations, such as the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAW), Middle Eastern women faced internal critics who accused them of betraying and corrupting their culture, being elitist and culturally inauthentic, and harming the anti-imperialist struggle for national unity and independence. Some contemporary scholars have characterized reformers such as Qasim Amin and Huda Shaarawi as being overly influenced by Western ideas and internalizing the critique of Eastern/Muslim women propagated by orientalists who misrepresented Islam and degraded women.

One of the strengths of these papers collectively is that they challenge us to deconstruct the binaries that have been used to shape our understanding of Middle Eastern women's movements, e.g. indigenous/Western or culturally authentic/inauthentic. The authors move the academic discourse about liberal reformist women's organizations beyond the dichotomous, and illuminate the interplay of internal forces, by showing how and why various women activists sought to work internationally for rights in their own country, as they attempted to persuade male elites to undertake the reforms they deemed necessary to improve women's status and opportunities.

In "Globalizing Iranian Feminism," Amin shows that Iranian women activists campaigning for women's suffrage purposefully sought international legitimacy as part of a strategy to influence national male elites who were unresponsive to their demand for the vote. By 1945, leaders of the Women's Party were holding Iran up to international standards of women's rights, citing the San Francisco Peace Conference declaration in favor of "complete equality between the sexes," the Vatican's support for women's suffrage, and the Allies' demand that occupied Japan grant women suffrage. In a communication to the Iranian parliamentary committee charged with reforming the electoral law, the Women's Party compared Iran and Japan, both occupied by Allied forces, and raised the specter of externally...