The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria

by Sara Rahnama

Overview

Winner of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize of the French Colonial Historical Society

The Future Is Feminist by Sara Rahnama offers a closer look at a pivotal moment in Algerian history when Algerians looked to feminism as a path out of the stifling realities of French colonial rule. Algerian people focused outward to developments in the Middle East, looking critically at their own society and with new eyes to Islamic tradition. In doing so, they reordered the world on their own terms—pushing back against French colonial claims about Islam's inherent misogyny.

Rahnama describes how Algerians took inspiration from Middle Eastern developments in women's rights. Empowered by the Muslim reform movement sweeping the region, they read Islamic knowledge with new eyes, even calling Muhammad "the first Arab feminist." They compared the blossoming women's rights movements across the Middle East and this history of Islam's feminist potential to the stifled position of Algerian women, who suffered from limited access to education and respectable work. Local dynamics also shaped these discussions, including the recent entry of thousands of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes.

While Algerian people disagreed about whether Algeria's future should be colonial or independent, they agreed that women's advancement would offer a path forward for Muslim society toward a more prosperous future. Through its use of Arabic-language sources alongside French ones, The Future Is Feminist moves beyond Algeria's colonial relationship to France to illuminate its relationship to the Middle East.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501773006
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sara Rahnama is Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University. Her writing has appeared in both academic and popular spaces, including Gender&History and the Washington Post. She was formerly a fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two daughters.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Rise of the Woman Question in Interwar Algeria
2. Domestic Workers in a Changing City
3. The Educated Muslim Woman and Algeria's Path to Progress
4. The Haik, the Hat, and the Gendered Politics of the New Public
5. French Feminists and the New Imperial Feminism
6. Muslim Women Address the Nation
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Elizabeth F. Thompson

The Future Is Feminist sheds new light on the emergence of anti-colonial movements after World War I. Sara Rahnama powerfully illustrates how by the 1940s Algerians had envisioned multiple futures within a transnational space.

Beth Baron

In The Future is Feminist, Sara Rahnama explores the multiple futures that were possible in interwar Algeria. These imagined futures, she shows us, were to be ones of greater equity and freedom than experiences in the present, with improving women's status key to liberation. Drawing on Arabic language sources in the press and elsewhere, and decentering nationalism, Rahmana highlights women's multivocality. Theoretically rich and beautifully written, the book is a major contribution to scholarship on gender and feminism, Islam, and colonialism.

Natalya Vince

The Future Is Feminist presents important developments that uniquely move Algeria beyond the colonizer/colonized relationship to situate it within both Middle Eastern and European histories. Rahnama's analyses on the politics of future imaginings and multidirectional social histories using underused sources will make this a definitive work for years to come.

Todd Shepard

This is a beautifully conceived and timely book. Sara Rahnama's sources and methods allow her to do more than remind us that some Muslims could be feminists: she demonstrates that questions of women and gender were foundational to wide-ranging efforts by Muslims in interwar Algeria to define social as well as political projects. The Future is Feminist resituates Maghrebi politics and intellectual life in contexts that stretch beyond French rule, so that Algerian women emerge as crucial actors in discussions that stretched across the Arab world as well as the Mediterranean.

2024 Andrew Alf Heggoy Prize Committee

As she reconstructs this landscape of Muslim feminists that looked East, Rahnama changes our understanding of the relationship between gender, Islam, and the French Republic in ways that will prove important for a wide range of fields. Impressively researched and adeptly written, The Future Is Feminist is a model for how to integrate, without flattening, a rich cross-section of experiences and voices across multiple social categories into a compelling narrative of possibility.

Editorial Reviews

This is a groundbreaking book that critically reframes how scholars think about who engages with feminism and how, across local, regional, and global spaces, as well as how the history of modern Algeria has unfolded and been told. With its crisp, accessible prose and compelling stories of decentralised yet impactful feminist discourse, The Future is Feminist promises a better future for the field of Maghribi history.

Journal of North African Studies