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The Institutionalization of Middle East Women’s Studies in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Margot Badran
Margot Badran*
Affiliation:
Hamilton College
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Extract

The wave of the study of women which led directly into the formation of the new discipline called women’s studies started in the 1960s in the Middle East and the United States concurrently. A generation earlier, foreshadowing the creation of the new field, Zahiyya Dughan, a Lebanese delegate to the Arab Women’s Conference in Cairo in 1944, called upon Arab universities to accord the intellectual and literary heritage of Arab women a place in the curriculum by creating chairs for the study of women’s writings. By now, at the end of the 1980s, women’s studies as a distinct field has found legitimacy in the academy. In the United States there are women’s studies programs in all major colleges and universities—more than sixty graduate programs offer M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s—and fifty major research centers, most of which are attached to universities. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and the Middle East Studies Association equally claim some three thousand members. However, the study of women remains marginal within Middle East studies, while women’s studies still remain largely centered on the West.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , July 1988 , pp. 9 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1988

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References

This paper was presented at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Baltimore, November 1989, at a panel chaired by Elizabeth Fernea, called “Studying Middle Eastern Women: The First Two Decades.” This panel aimed to reconvene members of the 1974 panel, also chaired by Elizabeth Fernea, called “Middle East Women,” to review interim developments in Middle East women’s studies. I would like to thank those who made comments on the paper at Baltimore and those members of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies who responded to a questionnaire on courses taught, and the many colleagues with whom there is a history of shared experience in advancing Middle East women’s studies. For valuable discussions on Middle East women’s studies I am thankful to members of the first AMEWS News editorial committee: Susan Schaefer Davis, Margaret Mills, Val Moghadam, and Lucie Wood Saunders. For discussions in the course of completing this paper I am grateful to Mariam Chamberlain, President of the National Council for Research Centers on Women, Florence Howe, the Director of the Feminist Press, and Caryn McTighe Musil, National Director of the National Women’s Studies Association, for generously responding to my questions and for their elaboration of women’s studies issues.

1 Address entitled “Al-Ta’āwun al-thaqāfīya bain al-duwwal al-’arabīya” (Cultural cooperation between Arab countries), presented at the Arab Feminist Conference, 13 December 1944, published in the proceedings of the conference in Cairo, 1945, pp. 153–160.

2 Although this paper focuses on the institutionalization process in the United States, some comparisons are made. The institutionalization of women’s studies in the Middle East deserves its own study.

3 See Joseph, Suad, “AMEWS Founded in New Orleans,” AMEWS News 1.1 (1986) 1–4.Google Scholar

4 I would like to thank Cynthia Romy from the University of Arizona for her assistance in checking past MESA conference programs for women’s studies presentations.

5 Middle East women’s writing on themselves has a long history, mirrored in other parts of the world as well. Here we point to early studies of women from various societies which appeared when women’s studies had started to take shape as a new scholarly field, and some of the most recent works.

6 For a review focused only on women and production I could cite eighteen articles appearing mainly in the 1970s, the majority of which did not appear in Middle East studies journals, but in disciplinary journals and women’s studies journals. See Badran, M., “Women and Production in the Middle East and North Africa,” Trends in History 2.2 (1982) 59–87.Google Scholar

7 The earliest bibliographies include: al-Qazzaz, A., Women in the Middle East and North Africa: An Annotated Bibliography, Middle East Monographs 2 (Center for Middle East Studies, University of Texas, Austin 1977)Google Scholar, and Raccagni, Michelle, The Modern Arab Woman: A Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, Metuchin, N.J. 1978)Google Scholar. I thank Basima Bezirgan for supplying me with an up-to-date list of bibliographies, which, like the literature they cite, are proliferating.

8 This volume is scheduled to appear in the fall of 1988, published by the Syracuse University Press. Among early examinations of issues problems and methodologies in Middle East Women’s studies, see, for example, Dusen, Roxanne Van, “The Study of Women in the Middle East: Some Thoughts,” MESA Bulletin 10.2 (May 1976) 1–19Google Scholar; Keddie, Nikki, “Problems in the Study of Middle Eastern Women,” IJMES 10.2 (1979)Google Scholar; and Tucker, Judith, “Problems in the Historiography of Women in the Middle East: The Case of Nineteenth Century Egypt,” IJMES 15 (1984) 321–336.Google Scholar

9 A sampling of titles of courses focusing exclusively on women in the Middle East includes: Women and Social Change in the Middle East; Islamic Law and Women’s Status in the Modern Middle East; Women in the Modern Middle East: A Survey; Women in the Middle East: Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices, Women’s Consciousness; and Arab Women’s Literature.

10 See, for example, Seven Years Later: Women’s Studies Programs in 1976 (National Advisory Council on Women’s Education, 1977); Bowles, Gloria and Duelli, Renate, eds., Theories of Women’s Studies (Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York 1983)Google Scholar; and Stimpson, Catherine R. with Cobb, Nina Kressner, Women’s Studies in the United States (St. Martin’s, New York 1986)Google Scholar. The Task Force on women in higher education, a massive project funded by the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Russell Sage Foundation will issue a study—forthcoming from the Russell Sage foundation—edited by Chamberlain, Mariani, tentatively titled Women in Academe: Progress and ProspectsGoogle Scholar. I thank Mariam Chamberlain for letting me see the draft chapter “Women’s Studies and Curricular Change.”

11 I would like to thank Janice Monk for sharing information on the project with me, and Anne Betteridge for forwarding me materials.

12 Observations made by Suad Joseph at the 1987 meeting.

13 On assessments of the transformational impact of women’s studies on the traditional disciplines and on the curriculum, see, for example, Howe, Florence, “The Feminist Scholarship, the Extent of the Revolution,” Change Magazine, April 1982, pp. 14–15Google Scholar; Sherman, Julia A. and Beck, Evelyn Torton, eds., The Prism of Sex (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1981)Google Scholar; Spender, Dale, Men’s Studies Modified (Pergamon Press, New York 1981)Google Scholar; Langland, Elizabeth and Gove, Walter, A Feminist Perspective in the Academy (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1981)Google Scholar; and Farnham, Christie, The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy (Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1987)Google Scholar. In her paper “New Approaches to the Study of Women” at the panel “Studying Middle East Women: The First Two Decades” at the 1987 MESA meeting, Elizabeth Fernea indicated some of the transforming impacts of Middle East women’s studies on traditional disciplines and on the field of Middle East studies.