However, foremost among the organizing achieve-
ments of the SCP was its foundation of an affiliated
Sudanese Women’s Union (SWU), at one time one
of the strongest women’s organizations on the Afri-
can continent or in the Middle East. The SWU was
founded in 1952, was active during the late nation-
alist period (1952–6), and reached its zenith in
1965, with branches opened throughout the coun-
try and liberal gains in women’s rights such as suf-
frage, equal pay, and maternity leave.
Despite this achievement, however, the patriar-
chal ideology, paternalism toward the SWU, and
the structure of the SCP and the gender strategies it
has followed have greatly diminished its effective-
ness as an agent of socialist gender transformation.
Most cadres have not had an adequate understand-
ing of the subjectivity of oppression and of the con-
nections between personal relations and public
political organization, nor have they understood
issues of sexuality, let alone directly addressed them.
With these omissions, it is unlikely that the SCP
could have done more than politicize the conven-
tional roles of Sudanese women. While it would be
wrong to say the SCP did not consider the role
of women in building the revolution or did not
imagine the place of women in a liberated Sudan,
it did not advocate or engage in, even within its
own organization, transformative gender practices
aimed at a revolutionary transformation.Bibliography
Z. B. El-Bakri and El-W. M. Kameir, Aspects of women’s
participation in Sudan, in International Social Science
Journal35:4 (1983), 605–23.
A. Gresh, The Free Officers and the Comrades. The
Sudanese Communist Party and Nimeiri face-to-face,
in International Journal of Middle East Studies 21
(1989), 393–409.
S. Hale, The wing of the patriarch. Sudanese women and
revolutionary parties, in Middle East Report16:1
(1986), 25–30.
——,Gender politics in Sudan. Islamism, socialism, and
the state, Boulder, Colo. 1996.
F. A. Ibràhìm, ¢arìqnàilàal-tuharrur, Khartoum n.d.
F. B. Mahmoud, The role of the Sudanese women’s move-
ment in Sudanese politics, M.A. diss., University of
Khartoum 1971.
G. Warburg, Islam, nationalism, and communism in a
traditional society. The case of Sudan, London 1978.Sondra HaleSyriaRevolutionary movements in twentieth-century
Syria have been a platform for women’s demands
for emancipation and access to political power.
However, even when they have captured control of662 political-social movements: revolutionary
government, these movements have not revolution-
ized women’s legal, economic, or social status, pri-
marily because of the weaknesses of the Syrian state
and economy, and the strength of conservative
opposition movements.
The 1908 Constitutional Revolution fostered a
new politics of citizenship in Syria and across the
late Ottoman Empire. Elite urban women mobi-
lized as citizens to promote social reforms, espe-
cially in family life, girls’ education, and public
hygiene, through the formation of charity groups
and through the newly uncensored press. Most
important was Màrì≠Ajamì’s magazine al-≠Arùs
(Bride), founded in 1910 in Damascus, which por-
trayed its female readers as agents of a social re-
naissance. The Young Turk government supported
Syrian women’s efforts to feed the poor and to edu-
cate girls during the First World War. It also decreed
the Family Law of 1917, which limited the author-
ity of religion in matters of marriage and divorce.
After the Ottomans’ defeat in 1918, Syrian women
activists supported constitutionalism and advo-
cated women’s suffrage under Faysal’s short-lived
Arab regime (1918–20). Their leader, Nàzik ≠âbid,
published a reformist journal, Nùr al-Fay™à±(Light
of Damascus), and headed a nurses’ battalion in the
fight against French occupation.
The French, who ruled Syria from 1920 to 1946,
did not promote reform of women’s legal or social
status. Women instead pursued reform through
alliances with the nationalist opposition to French
rule. Adìl Bayhum al-Jazà±irlì, who headed the
Syrian Women’s Union for decades after its 1928
founding, cooperated with the National Bloc. Their
alliance was based on shared commitments to lib-
eralism and nationalism (Sakàkìnì1950) among
the landowning and rising middle classes. Jazà±irlì
led women in campaigns for education and perso-
nal status reform, as well as campaigns for Arabist
causes, especially in defense of Palestinians. Thurayà
£àfiΩalso emerged as a leader in public demon-
strations for women’s political rights and against
veiling (Shaaban 1998, 47–51). Women supported
nationalists in armed revolt against the French in
1925–8 and again in May 1945. But willingness to
fight for their country did not win women immedi-
ate rights. Leaders of the National Bloc, who inher-
ited rule from the French, expanded women’s access
to education after 1946, but they were not politically
strong enough to promote substantive legal reform
in face of opposition from the Muslim Brother-
hood. It was only with £usnìal-Za≠ìm’s military
coup against the nationalist elite in 1949 thatwomen
attained partial suffrage (Razzaz 1975, 151–60). An-