In this book, I have argued that women poets have been overlooked in literary histories of Progressive writing. I have attempted to redress that balance by presenting an overview across the twentieth century of how a unique chapter of Progressive women's poetry was unfolding alongside the more radical group of prose writers in the first half of the twentieth century. In tracing their narratives, I note a unique secular and sacred aesthetic in the work of Progressive women poets in Pakistan. I suggest that the world of Urdu literary culture does not always follow geographical boundaries; it is transnational and global but has been subject to ideological interventions and culture wars in Pakistan and India. Reflecting on anticolonial nationalist mobilization in the pre-independence period, I consider the post-Partition phase and Pakistani women's poetry as an alternative sphere, where the representation of self and subjectivity signalled the entry of a new Pakistani woman whose writing reflected the traumas of the new nation. This new woman was a patchwork of influences who came to the fore with a resistance-led feminist aesthetic in the 1980s. Progressive women's poetry was a notionally secular response to the religious nation, embodying alternative middle-class values that embraced intimacy, sexuality and opposition to the state's affiliation with the conservative Jamaat-e Islami party. In my argument I have demonstrated that there is a strong connection between Progressive poetry and the women's movement committed to social justice.