Introduction Available to Purchase

Histories of gender in the modern Middle East and North Africa have flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work is circumscribed by the nation-state, which remains the primary framing for discussions of women’s activism and gender-based reform. Existing scholarship includes glimpses of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries but rarely foregrounds these transnational connections or emphasizes how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This roundtable brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Its five short essays highlight modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We demonstrate the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with...