A Feminist Fight for a Nation: Palestine Under British Mandate

Img.1.  Palestinian Women collecting money for the revolt. 

Feminism in the Western World, has often been grouped together as a collective experience. Women fighting for their rights, for suffrage and emancipation, have dominated the historical narrative of gender. However, these definitions are too limiting, it is stupefying and ignorant of us to recognise the plight of women, from an exclusively western view point, from a place where female liberation was of the utmost importance. Feminism comes in many different forms, and the ways in which feminism was embedded in the Palestinian nationalist movements of the 1920s against British mandate is what this week’s blog will focus on.

 

“Assumes that our consciousness of being ‘women’ has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just gender.” – Mohanty, C.T. (1991) “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism”. Indiana University Press 

 

Palestinian women’s activism, has, since the beginning of the twentieth century, been towards the struggle for national liberation. It is difficult to find any explicit examples of Palestinian women fighting exclusively for the emancipation of women, which has directed western academia on the topic away from finding the feminist readings of these events. What much of the histories on Palestine written before 1990 forget, is that it would be unrealistic to expect the prioritisation of women’s rights, whilst ALL Palestinians were being denied their human rights by Britain and her allies. The “two-stage liberation theory” has also dominated much of the earliest feminist narratives, claiming that women first fight for national liberation, and later worry of women’s liberation. Instead, the idea of nationalism, and national struggle as the ‘releasing effect’, is more convincing in the case of Palestine. Through this ongoing national struggle, women could legitimise their activism, and provide them with a public role, political expression and a growing sense of gender identity and awareness. In October of 1929 over 200 women elected an Arab Women’s Executive Committee, which decided that every town and city needed representatives of the Arab Women’s Association, in order to enact upon the national effort against British Mandate, and the fragmentation of Palestinian land in the creation of a Jewish homeland. Thus, indicating the extensive involvement of women in this national struggle, and their contributions the struggle carved a political space and arena to exert their autonomy. Whilst maybe not recognisable or as blatantly posed as the suffragette movements taking place in the British homeland, it would be limiting to not recognise these act of Palestinian women, and their involvement in the national struggle as being the origin of Palestinian feminism.  

 

This weeks post, was not merely to highlight the struggle of Palestinian women, and their emerging feminist narratives. I also wanted to highlight the ways in which feminism can differ, and show how there is not one feminist narrative, but many different, multifaceted ways in which feminism can arise, and be enacted upon. This is the challenge of us reading these gendered histories; the “challenge to understand variegated feminisms in their own specific, historical and cultural contexts”. 

Bibliography

Fleischman, Ellen. (2000) Nation, tradition and rights The indigenous feminism of the Palestinian women’s movement, 1929-1948. Pub. in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire Citizenship, Nation, and Race. pp. 138-154

Kuttab, Eileen. (2009) The Palestinian Women’s Movement: From Resistance and Liberation to Accomodation and Globalization. Graduate Institute Publications

Mohanty, C.T. (1991) “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism”. Indiana University Press 

Woollacott, A. (2006). Gender and empire. 1st ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.