CS 201B

When?
What?
Where?
 When?

Middle Ages
Classical Islam
Pre-modern Period
Antiquity
 Which dates?

500 BCE to 500 CE

500 CE to 1500 CE
500 CE to 1000 CE
1000 CE to 1500 CE

BCE: Before common era

CE: Common era
 Where?

In Medieval Europe
Around the Mediterranean
In the Medieval Middle East
In the Byzantine Empire
 What?

Gender theories
Main Features of Medieval European and Arab
History
The (pre-modern) private and public roles assigned to
women
How women reacted to these roles
How and when did Women
and Womens History
become a scholarly field of
study?
 From Activism to Scholarship

18th and 19th centuries 20th century

In Europe, the United States, and the Middle East

Nabawiyya Musa, Huda Sharawi, Saiza Nabarawi
Womens conference in Rome in 1923
 Womens Activism
in the 18th, 19th and 20thCenturies
Women began to organize vocally and publically to change their social
conditions in the course of the 18th and 19th century in Europe and the United
States.

They were very quickly followed by women in the Arab world mostly in
Egypt. Egypt had conquered and governed by the French and the British. The
Egyptian middle and upper class was well acquainted with European culture.

In the 19th century, the Arab world went through a period called al-Nahda,
men and women, engaged in reflecting upon Arab/Muslim society. The
condition of women was among the issues that were raised as a means to
modernize society.
 Gerda Lerners

history v/s History?

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013)

Gerda Lerner, one of the first women scholars to engage in writing a history PhD Columbia University
which accounts for the role of women in the making of history. Established first MA and PhD
programs in Womens History
(The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986)

She argued that we must distinguish between history (with a small h) and

History (with a capital H).

? History v/s history?
 history History

The
unrecorded The recorded
and
past interpreted past.
 Writing of Womens History in the West

The engagement of women in the writing of History, started in Europe and the United States in the

early 20th century.

European and American women acquired the right to vote and felt that it was necessary to record the

struggles and biographies of the women involved.

This stirred a movement interested in documenting the lives of women not only in the present but

also from the distant past.

Women started researching all types of sources (Christian religious texts, literature, legal texts,

historical texts state archives, newspapers) to gather information of the lives of women in the distant

past.
 Gerda Lerner argues that like men, women are and always have been actors and agents of history.

Women have always had a central role in the making of society and the building of civilization.

She notes that History (with a capital H) is a creation which started with the invention of writing
in ancient Mesopotamia.

From that point on historians whether priests, royal servants, or university trained scholars have
selected the events to be recorded and have interpreted them to give them meaning and
significance
 Historians

??Men or Women??
 Until very recently, these historians have been men.

They have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant and have called it History.

What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected and ignored in interpretation.

Historical scholarship, up to the most recent past, has seen women as marginal to the making of civilization.

The recorded and interpreted past of the human race tells the story from the viewpoint of the male half of

humanity.

In other words, until the most recent past, History only told His/story.

Women historians were now interested in writing Her/story.

Gerda Lerner argued for the need to develop a terminology and theories to discuss

a. The various conditions in which women found themselves

b. The struggles women engaged in to improve their living conditions

c. The system establishing these conditions since the dawn of civilization

 Terminology proposed by Lerner to describe the various
conditions in which women found themselves

Oppression: Forceful domination of women following a struggle in which women were

defeated

Subordination: Subjected to the authority of another at times willfully in exchange for

protection and privilege.

Deprivation: Denial or refusal to grant women rights or privileges by individuals,

groups or institutions (a husband, a father, family, the law, university)

 Terminology proposed by Lerner for the struggles women were engaged
to improve their lives

Feminism: An intellectual and social movement which aims at studying, understanding and

improving the condition of women and empowering them.

Womens rights: the demand that men and women have equal rights

Emancipation: Freedom from oppression and subordination

Sex/Gender System: the system with grants resources, property, rights to persons of different sexes

according to culturally defined gender roles.

 Terminology proposed by Lerner for the system(s) establishing these conditions since
the dawn of civilization

Patriarchy: The system of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male
dominance over women in society in general.

One of the most challenging tasks of Womens History is to trace with precision the various forms and modes in which
patriarchy appears historically, the shifts and changes in its structure and function and the adaptation it makes to female
pressure and demands.

Paternalism: The basis for paternalism is an unwritten contract of exchange economic support and protection given
by the male for subordination in all matters sexual service and unpaid domestic service offered by the female.
Paternalism defines a subset of patriarchal relations.

Sexism: Sexism defines the ideology of male supremacy and the beliefs that sustain it.

Sexism stands to patriarchy in a way similar to how racism stands to slavery.

 How to write a history of Women
in the Arab/Muslim Mediterranean East
 Women around the Mediterranean Shared common

beliefs and objectives

The main objective in writing

womens history is then to

A belief that when women have to acquire and understanding how inequalities are

understanding of the historical factors of built and how historical change occurs

their subordination as a first step towards their in order to find means to change or

emancipation. improve the situation in which women

find themselves today.

 How to write a history of Women in the Arab/Muslim Mediterranean

The movement which started in the west was soon taken up by women from the Arab/Muslim

world.

It started mainly in Egypt in the late 19th c with women such as Huda al-Sharawi, Nabawiyya

Musa, May Ziadeh, Anbara Salam Khalidi, Nawal al-Saadawi and later in the 20th c with

Fatima Mernissi and Leila Ahmed.

These women were interested in part in turning to the Classical period Islamic history.
This classical Islamic period is crucial because it witnessed the recording of

what are recognized today as the foundational texts of Muslim civilization:

Quran, Hadith, Islamic Law, Literature, History

 As a result these women engaged in different types of historical writing:

On the one hand, some of them researched those foundational texts for information of

womens lives and their roles in the private sphere of the household but also in the

public sphere in social and professional life, in politics, in war and in cultural production

for example in the writing of poetry and music.

Some argued that the interpretation of the foundational texts reflected masculine concerns

and proposed their own interpretation of these texts.

Huda al-Sharawi (1879-1947)
Harem Years: The Memoirs of an
Egyptian Feminist (1879-1923)
Nawal al-Sadawi (1931- ), Egyptian
Physician
Memoirs from the Womens Prison (1984)
Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015)
Moroccan Sociologist
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female
Dynamics in a Muslim Society
(1975)
The Forgotten Queens of
Islam (1990)
Leila Ahmed (1940- )
Professor of Womens Studies in
Religion at Harvard University
Womens engagement in the writing of their own history shared common

beliefs and objectives but adopted different approaches or different theories

of gender relations.

We will look at these different gender theories next week.

Thank You