1870s onwards, most of the empire was devastated
by continuous warfare on the frontiers, with two
key results for our purposes here: massive refugee
flows into the empire from lost provinces, and con-
scription of men of all ages into the army, leaving
women as de factoheads of households. These
demographic facts gave weight to arguments of
Çemseddin Sâmi that women needed to be educated
for work outside the home, and women were
actively recruited by state actors into the new high
tech sectors of telegraphy and telephony, as well as
into teaching and writing for publication. By the
end of the First World War, women in the work-
place had become familiar to urbanites in the
Mediterranean basin from Cairo to Istanbul, and
out to the borders of Iraq. The situation in Iran, in
majority-Muslim colonies in south and east Asia,
and in North Africa was somewhat different.Interwar era
After the First World War, much of the Muslim
world was under the rule or “tutelage” of Euro-
pean and east Asian powers. In the 1920s and
1930s, local notables were deeply invested in prov-
ing their fitness to rule, which included the display
of modern attitudes toward women. Nonetheless,
women in this region underwent a similar pressure
to return home and leave jobs to the male survivors
of the First World War. An example of how Euro-
pean attitudes were used to criticize and at the same
time subvert local authorities is the odd character
of Lord Cromer, consul-general of Egypt. When at
home in England, Lord Cromer was an active mem-
ber of a club aiming to suppress efforts by British
women to gain the vote. In Egypt, though, he was a
trenchant critic of veiling and other local practices
that he portrayed as oppressive of Muslim women,
arguing that their piteous state was evidence of
Muslims’ inability to rule themselves. Though his
intentions were not aimed in the end at expanding
women’s rights, his rhetoric nonetheless opened
doors to heightened debate about the potential and
necessity of educating women and allowing them
more public roles in modernizing Islamic societies
and states. Qàsim Amìn’s arguments were given an
extra boost, for example, and Egyptian and Syrian
women took the changed public atmosphere as
their opportunity to found women’s magazines
promoting a variety of feminist agendas. During
the British Protectorate of Egypt and the mandate
system in the Arab heartlands, male bureaucrats
saw to it that women’s education expanded along
with general education throughout the region as a
way of mobilizing human resources for independ-
ence. Nation-states required local leadership with780 womens right’s: male advocacy
local loyalties at the ruling level, but equally essen-
tial were loyal citizens, conscious of their demo-
cratic rights and responsibilities and capable of
fulfilling their new roles. For this reason, women
were activated as educated housewives and moth-
ers, having the primary responsibility for raising
children to become the new patriotic and hard-
working citizens of modern nation-states.
In the mandate territory of Palestine, this project
was complicated by a continual flow of Jewish
immigrants into and out of Palestine. Jews of
European origin arrived with a civilizing mission in
mind, and many of them also arrived with socialist
and communist ideals they pursued, including
absolute equality (outside the home) for women.
The kibbutzim and moshavim (collective com-
munities) of early Palestine were active areas of
experimentation in such radical ideas as collective
childcare and women’s equal participation in the
workforce in areas not traditionally associated with
women. Some of these early collectives attempted
to establish peaceful coexistence with Arab popula-
tions, incorporating them into their collective proj-
ects of improving the land. The effect of this radical
stream of European thought has been diluted by the
continuing marginalization of Jewish Zionists
arguing for peaceful coexistence and other alterna-
tive social visions in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, as well as the State of Israel’s need to
develop a vibrant capital sector in order to support
its military expenditures. Nonetheless, the ideas of
Marx and Engels, along with those of Fourier and
other European radicals of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, put these men, and their
followers in the region, in the camp of men sup-
porting expansion of women’s rights and responsi-
bilities to support state-building projects.
In North Africa, women were extremely active in
the bloody struggle for independence from France
throughout the 1960s and still echoing in Algerian
politics today. In post-revolutionary states and
postcolonial states, the new rulers were often
either military men wedded to meritocratic ideas
that some applied and some did not apply to
women along with men. Another variant was a
new or modernizing monarchy as in Morocco or
Afghanistan, where kings moved rapidly to pull
women into educational and work environments,
and even into active political life as elected and
appointed officials of the state. In Dutch colonies in
southeast Asia, as well as the former British colony
of India, Muslim women became objects of reform,
as well as activists in anti-colonial struggles. Male
Muslim scholars and activists participated directly
in the formative debates of Arab-Muslim moder-