Innovative Women: Unsung Pioneers of Social Change

This special issue is based on papers presented at a workshop on New Ideas for Middle Eastern Societies: Analyzing Women’s Writings, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. The chief sponsor was the fund created to support three years’ postdoctoral fellowships from my International Balzan Foundation Prize, with several co-sponsors including the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Three of the authors, A. Holly Shissler, Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, and Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, were Keddie/Balzan Fellows in 2005–07.

Although the articles have varied contents and conclusions, all deal, at least in part, with women and some men who had innovative ideas—regarding prostitution and marriage (Shissler), birth control (Baron), education (Rostam-Kolayi), or the expression of feelings related to gender and sexuality (Amir-Ebrahimi). Powerful men sometimes appropriated these ideas, often erasing their originators’ names from history; sometimes rejected these ideas; and sometimes ignored them. Yet many of these ideas were later accepted, and some are still on the agenda. Their originators deserve to be credited and understood.

Given space limits, the authors could not deal extensively with the broader historical circumstances in which their subjects operated. Here I will briefly discuss this background, even though some points are contested and most need more thorough study. Several of the points made in this introduction are made at greater length in my Women in the Middle East: Past and Present (2007).

In some recent scholarly writing there has been a tendency, in reaction to the exaggerated view of Muslim women’s oppression prevalent in the West, not to dwell on the gender inequalities found among premodern Middle Eastern Muslims and rather to stress positive trends and the very real negative aspects of relations with Western imperialism. Yet the internal obstacles that innovative women and men faced cannot be appreciated without an understanding of the conditions they experienced, many of which predated relations with Western imperialism, though some were exacerbated by these relations. Modernization was intertwined with imperialism, and produced both new opportunities and new difficulties for many women.

Most of the women discussed lived in times when veiling and seclusion were the norm for respectable urban women like themselves. The Qur’an often addresses women and men as spiritually equal, though its legal parts have given men significant control in marriage, divorce, and some other matters. Many later traditions attributed to the Prophet (often doubtfully) entered Islamic law and custom. Most interpreted the Qur’an in inegalitarian ways and many were more restrictive of women than was the Qur’an, often telling them not to leave the marital home without their husbands’ permission, and favoring women who veiled completely, lived secluded from non-family men, accepted a degree of domestic violence, and obeyed their male guardians and husbands in virtually everything, including sexual demands. Predominant traditions and Islamic law enshrined a second-class status for women, who were often (as in an earlier West) considered more emotional than rational, mentally unequal to men, lustful and hence requiring unusual controls on their sexuality, and, in some traditions, inclined to promote unrest and sometimes evil. In real life there were also positive aspects for most women, including protection by the natal family, some economic independence, and positive relations with other women.

Three of the articles in this issue deal in significant part with women who contested traditional ideas and practices concerning sexuality and women’s bodies: Shissler discusses Sertel’s radical, Marxist-influenced views on prostitution and marriage; Amir-Ebrahimi analyzes pioneering attitudes toward sexuality and feelings regarding gender expressed in weblogs, and reactions to them; and Baron discusses different men’s and women’s approaches to birth control, including whether it should be promoted by governmental and other agencies or by local networks, and whether men or women should be primarily responsible for it, and she points to a woman pioneer whose ideas were too long ignored.

The history and sociology of Middle Eastern female sexuality has had relatively little scholarly treatment. Most anthropologists and sociologists who live in local communities prefer to concentrate on other topics, and documentation...