Women in the Limelight: Some Recent Books on Middle Eastern Women's History

The study of women in the Middle East was almost dormant for the quarter-century after 1945. Since then, it has flowered, especially in the United States but also elsewhere, and it seems useful to take stock via a review of some of the main Englishlanguage scholarly books of the past decade that are of special interest to historians, including brief mention of some relevant works in the social sciences. To keep this to a reasonable length, this review concentrates on books relevant to women's history since 1800 on Iran, Egypt, greater Syria, Turkey, and North Africa, and omits journalistic and biographical books, and the important work done in literature and the arts, and also in the books primarily about other subjects. It also omits articles that were not published in books not primarily about Middle Eastern women, gender, or the family. It does not claim to include or analyze every significant book, as significance is partly a question of individual judgment and scholarly interests. The article is limited to books published since 1990. There have been several areas of concentration of recent books on Middle Eastern women's history: (1) books emphasizing the early period of Islam, including changes in certain ideas, laws, and practices from the time of Muhammad until the Abbasids, some of them carrying their issues down to modern times; (2) books on the role of women and the family in the Ottoman Empire, especially its Arab and Turkish provinces, and relatedly, books that include chapters on women in other Turkish or TurkoMongol-ruled areas, including Safavid Iran, and on Mamluk women; and (3) books on women in modern times. These make use of the greater documentation and participant observation available for this period, and include cultural, biographical, and socioeconomic books as well as works concentrating on women in politics and women's movements. I here limit myself to some of the important works about the modern period, having discussed some works in the other categories elsewhere.'