Reviews for The Nation and Its "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948

The average rating for The Nation and Its "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-31 00:00:00 Dean Burke Jr. I'm no Gender History aficionado, but even I liked this book. It is very informative. The salient point Fleischmann drives home is that "feminism" in any non-Western context needs to be judged according to standards commensurate with that context. In other words, do not superimpose on non-Western women a grid of what constitutes 'true' feminism that is based on the history of Western woman's experience. Although this is a seemingly banal point, Fleischmann does an excellent job of demonstrating how "Palestinian" women's involvement in the national liberation movement against the British Mandate and Zionist settler-colonialism was its own tacit form of feminism. In short, Palestinian women's actions spoke louder than their words. However, Fleischmann emphasizes the point that the Palestinian women's movement subordinated specific gender issues to the seemingly more pressing matter of national liberation - reflecting the so-called two-stage theory of liberation (national liberation first, women's liberation second). This subsumption of women's specific gender concerns to the nationalist interest is the chief explanatory factor Fleischmann relies on to make sense of ongoing Palestinian women's subordination in a patriarchal and conservative social hierarchy. From what little I know of Fleischmann, she's no friend of British imperialism or Zionism, and this much is palpable throughout her text. Nevertheless, she seems like a very honest scholar as she presents a fairly sanguine picture of the British Mandate in Palestine and its legacy. As grating as British imperiousness and arrogance in the Mandate was, British rule there appears to have fostered an overall "liberal" environment, one open enough that it gave women a chance to gain an education and a certain level of autonomy in a very patriarchal society, and the oral testimonies of many Palestinian women appear to confirm as much. I would imagine that Fleischmann has annoyed some scholars with this conclusion. That these women would eventually use the education they acquired against the British for nationalist agitation is no small irony. The reader will certainly see some parallels between the Palestinian women's movement of the 1920s-40s and modern Palestinian society. Let's just say that the political and military tactics Palestinian women used against the British and the Zionists in the Mandate are used by Palestinian women today against the Israeli occupation - a residual form of women's agency in a still patriarchal and conservative culture. However, I do not think Fleischmann's research provides cogent evidence that "Palestinian" women in the "Palestinian" women's movement ever really self-consciously considered themselves "Palestinian," despite the title of her book. That identity has to be read into the history, and is anachronistic. Certainly, these women were aware of their residence in a British Mandate called "Palestine". But did they consider themselves "Palestinians"? I do not think this is borne out in the evidence. These women appear to have considered themselves Arabs first and foremost, and they appear to have had a local identity that was torn between Bilad-a-Sham on the one hand, and Egypt on the other. But aside from facing the unique threat to their region posed by Zionism, it does not seem very convincing that these women considered themselves "Palestinians" in any essentialized nationalist sense. That appears to be a later development. And that begs the question as to whether Palestinian national identity is at root and in essence, a contrarian and adversarial one.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-15 00:00:00 Mia St John Also more of a 3.5 don't ask me about my ratings system I don't know. Up untill the the halfway point I think the book covers a lot of the same ground that a lot of studies of women and gender in MENA in this period cover, after that it gets more interesting and speaks to things more specific to the Palestinian situation.