Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (review)

This book helped me to understand the complexity of events leading up to the Iraqi occupation by the U.S. and the enormous hardships endured over the years by Iraqi women.

Interviews, life stories, personal narratives, and accounts of historical events take a reader through Iraq's development, including the installment of a puppet monarchy by the British following World War I to the arrival of the Ba'th party and hopes for change by certain segments of the population during the onset of Saddam Hussein's regime. The book is a must read for anyone who wants to know more than the usual sound bite about Iraq and its people, constructing an alternate history from a pool of subjective truths that reflect the experience of a largely middle-class, educated group of women from urban backgrounds. The author uses pseudonyms to assure anonymity. Even so, it is an eye-opening account for U.S. readers with little real grasp of what it takes to survive throughout horrific periods of violence, deprivation, and family death.

The author, who is of Iraqi-German origin, explains how she developed a sense of "Iraqiness" in connection with the Gulf War of 1991 and the humanitarian crisis resulting from economic sanctions. In preparation for the book, the author tracked the diaspora of Iraqis throughout different parts of the world, speaking with women of many generations and from different cities including London, Amman, Detroit, and San Diego. A comprehensive story gets told through a collage of narratives which explain how women attempted at all costs to sustain their families.

Throughout the twentieth century, Iraqi women had been politically active. The author recounts that during the 1940s, women of primarily upper class backgrounds had been involved in charitable organizations, like the Red Crescent Society, fighting for better health and childcare services. Women were also involved in organizations like the League against Nazism and Fascism and in the Iraqi Women's Union, founded in 1945, which was Iraq's most important feminist organization of its day. A major opposition force in the 1940s and 50s, the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) captured the hearts and minds of many segments of the population in galvanizing opposition to British colonialism. Many women of this generation were actively involved in the ICP, including Iraqi Kurds and Jews. The author explains how one of the key factors that impacted the course of events inside Iraq was the coup d'etat of the Free Officers in Egypt in 1952, which effectively ended the monarchy there. This also fanned the flames of revolution in Iraq, led by a coalition that included the ICP. Soroya, a woman who participated in these events explains: "Most people did not think it was a bad thing to pull the body of the King through the streets. I did not think it was bad at the time. But now we feel differently about it. The communists were blamed for it. But people were angry. They had been exploited and had lived in poverty and reacted badly" (76).

The violence that followed gave way to political and social realignments. The emergence in the late sixties of the Ba'th Party, initially fueled in part by Pan-Arab ideology, opened the doors to more violence as told by Su'ad: "In 1963, after the Ba'thist coup, al-Haris al-Qawmi [the National Guard] started raping women in Najaf. They looked for good-looking girls and took them from their families …. There were lots of fathers who killed their daughters to prevent them being raped …" (93).

Memories continue to cascade throughout the book, recounting how, during Saddam Hussein's initial emergence to power in 1979, he encouraged large groups of women to become more educated and participate in society to help him solidify his political position. Compulsory military service was established during the Iran Iraq War between 1980 and 1988 when women were encouraged to have large families...