Abstract
A major challenge when teaching Islamic and Middle East history—whether medieval, early modern, or modern—is that few textbooks meaningfully integrate gender and sexuality into broad overviews intended for undergraduates. Lisa Pollard and Mona L. Russell's History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East: From Orientalism to the Arab Spring is a long-overdue text for instructors wanting to center women's and queer experiences in courses focusing on the nineteenth century to the present.
Pollard and Russell's cowritten book shares the history of the region and its women from the eighteenth century through the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Iran. The authors define the Middle East as Egypt, Turkey, Iran, the Levant, Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf States, with the inclusion of North African countries Tunisia and Libya in their chapter on the Arab Spring. They predominantly discuss Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, and Iran in depth across all chapters but the inclusion, particularly of the Persian Gulf states, is quite welcome as they tend to be peripheral or underdiscussed in courses on the modern Middle East. Pollard and Russell aimed to write a “history of the region from which real women and symbolic constructs of what it means to be a woman, cannot be subtracted” (1). The book is also concerned with Middle Eastern women's encounters with and negotiations of modernity. The chronology works well because it mirrors how many instructors already organize their survey courses on the modern Middle East and in some cases, it will be a real resource for those looking to add in more contemporary history.
Pollard is a Professor Emerita of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and Russell is an Associate Professor of History at East Carolina University. Their individual monographs and articles focus on women in modern Egypt, with much of Pollard's work focusing on families, and Russell studying gender, education, and consumerism. The strongest elements of the chapters presented in History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East are when they discuss Egyptian history. Both authors have considerable experience teaching undergraduates about the Middle East. Indeed, the book was written in part for their students who anticipated women's voices and experiences being absent in their text about the region as is often the case in many broad surveys (1).
History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East is organized chronologically into nine chapters followed by several thematic chapters serving as the conclusion. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction where the authors set out their goals for the book. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways women belonging to a variety of social classes lived and worked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter 3 explores how these same women were portrayed in the European imagination through Orientalist imagery and misogynistic accounts. Chapter 4 then focuses on reforms occurring in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Qajar Iran and how these state modernizing efforts impacted gender expectations and one's role within the nation. This chapter serves as a precursor to chapters 5 and 6 which concentrate on the well-documented topic of the “new woman” and “the woman question.” Chapter 5 focuses on men's articulation of this topic and includes a very strong section on slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Iran and its relationship to international abolitionist discourse. Chapter 6 explores how women defined themselves, often in response to press debates covered in the previous chapter. Of particular interest for this journal's readers is how men and women framed women's responsibilities to the family in service of the nation. I hope that historians of the family who do not focus on the Middle East incorporate chapters 5 and 6 into their thematic courses. Pollard and Russell then turn to the First World War and its aftermath (up to the 1930s) in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 discusses “state- and ethnicity-building agendas” in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Israel/Palestine from roughly the 1920s up to the 2000s and explores how the “woman question” was reframed for the twentieth century. Chapter 9 primarily focuses on women's movements in Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, Israel, Lebanon, and then briefly on Syria and Kurdish communities in Turkey from the 1950s onward, both feminist and those that would not take up that mantle.
The remaining chapters of History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East are organized thematically. Chapter 10 focuses on women and work which expands on discussions that appeared in Chapter 2 into the nineteenth century up to the twenty-first century. Pollard and Russell effectively chart how women's labor is often undervalued, underpaid, or not even compensated at all in the region even into the present. Chapter 11 explores sexuality, and Chapter 12 highlights fashion, clothing, and the body. In addition to discussing how fashion and sartorial choice often serve as markers of regime politics, there is also a fascinating section in the latter on Fula, a Barbie-esque doll intended to be more representative of Middle Eastern cultures. The book concludes with discussions of women in war and revolution in Chapter 13, and finally the Arab Spring in Chapter 14. Of these topics, the chapter on women in war and revolution is outstanding and should be brought into all Middle East history classes. Pollard and Russell strongly articulate the many ways that women—whether Palestinian, Iraqi, Iranian, or Yemeni—navigated conflicts and crises in both the past and present.
Pollard and Russell synthesize arguments from major texts within the field of Middle East history to craft their narrative. This approach is useful as it presents students with ideas from scholars such as Janet Afary, Beth Baron, Khaled el-Rouayheb, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Saba Mahmood, among others. It would not be feasible in an undergraduate survey course to assign their individual monographs, so it is helpful to expose students to their ideas through History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East. Most sources cited come from the early to mid-2000s; it would have been useful—particularly in the sexuality chapter—if they incorporated more recent scholarship. Several chapters also include black-and-white images to useful effect. Chapter 3 presents well-known Orientalist paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres which will help students comprehend these misogynistic and exoticized images of Middle Eastern women. Chapter 7 “New States and Their Women” is particularly rich in terms of images, providing images of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad during the First World War and Egyptian and Lebanese cartoons that critiqued British and French colonial domination. I did notice that many portraits included in the book were of male authoritarian leaders; it would have been nice to see more images of women—whether famous or everyday individuals—since students can easily search for and find photos of figures such as Reza Shah Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al-Asad.
Pollard and Russell's book has several strengths that make it appealing for course adoption. The first is that the authors were able to cover the multiplicity of women's experiences in the Middle East from the eighteenth century to the recent present, and they successfully frame how women's race, ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, marriage status, education, and more impacted their agency and opportunities throughout history. Middle Eastern women were not and are not a monolith, and each chapter highlights this to great effect. Secondly, well-known texts often assigned in survey courses (i.e., Cleveland and Bunton's A History of the Middle East, now in its seventh edition) may mention women in just one to two sentences—if that—in each chapter. Pollard and Russell show that you can center women's history and still talk about key historical events and movements, whether the Tanzimat era or the Iran–Iraq War. Though women were often not included in making these political decisions, they nonetheless experienced and participated in these historic moments. As a result, instructors can spend more time contextualizing and sharing primary sources with their students as opposed to crafting supplemental lectures related to gender. Because of Pollard and Russell's book, students will already be centering gender and have the background knowledge they need. Next, History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East is very attentive to issues related to the family. Pollard and Russell track continuities and changes with regard to how different states upheld the patriarchy and deployed rhetoric surrounding expectations for maternity, and how women negotiated motherhood and other familial roles. A final strength is the book's ability to share a lot of information in a concise number of pages. The chronologically organized chapters never exceed 25 pages. In a time when it can be challenging to get students to do the reading, Pollard and Russell crafted cohesive narratives in easily digestible chapters.
I found chapter elements relating to the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic to be weak. This perhaps could be from my bias as a specialist in this area. While it is challenging to cover everything within such an expansive narrative, Pollard and Russell did not integrate Turkish feminists who challenged and complicated Mustafa Kemal's state feminism. They overemphasized the role of his first wife Latife Hanim at the expense of introducing readers to figures such as Nezihe Muhiddin, Suat Derviş, or Sabiha Sertel who found themselves in the crosshairs of the Kemalist government because of their politics and activism. Additionally, they failed to incorporate considerable scholarship that critically argues that Mustafa Kemal often made choices by the 1930s to consciously distance his single-party authoritarian regime from that of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. I think their analysis in Chapter 8 would have been strengthened if they were more critical of the Kemalist project. However, one of the most important works on this topic—Yaprak Zihnioǧlu's Kadınsız İnkilap (Revolution without Women, 2003)—has not yet been translated into English and is therefore inaccessible to Pollard and Russell if they do not read Turkish. Additionally, there are several typos and errors when it comes to Ottoman/Turkish words; for example, Ahmet Midhat Efendi's book is Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi not Felatun and Rakim (79). Ziya Gökalp (not Gölkalp) was an influential thinker who inspired Kemalist ideology (132). For a text that works hard to be inclusive and to remedy a lack of voices, it is jarring to have historic aspects misrepresented and incorrect, especially if non-Middle East historians bring individual chapters into their courses. Pollard and Russell are historians of Egypt so it makes sense that there could be some mistakes. This is perhaps one drawback of a cowritten book rather than an edited volume. Additionally, Chapter 11 on sexuality will require some careful attention with regard to terminology. Pollard and Russell do an excellent job explaining why English terms related to LGBTQ+ identities (such as queer) do not necessarily translate to Middle Eastern contexts. Their discussions of transpeople may get pushback from students. The book uses “transsexuality” and “transsexual” which no doubt is drawn from Afsaneh Najmabadi's 2013 work Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (211-3). Transsexual is outdated and can be offensive to individuals in the transcommunity in 2024.
History, Women, and Gender in the Modern Middle East is an accessible and comprehensive text for undergraduate audiences. The minor errors do not detract from the overall quality, and it will be a welcome addition for instructors whether one is teaching a survey of the region or a class specifically on Middle Eastern women's history. Individual chapters could be used in different thematic courses focusing on feminism, war and peace, and labor history. I am excited to assign Pollard and Russell's text when I next teach my course on women's movements in the modern Middle East.