Women’s and gender history began to move in a comparative direction during the late 1990s, opening up new possibilities in scholarship about Western and non-Western contexts alike. Sonya Michel (1998: 189) asked, “Why the comparative turn, and why now?” According to Michel, “The proliferation of historical knowledge about women and gender invites broad cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons” (190) and a “collective commitment to fighting national parochialism” (Rupp 2008: 33; see also Offen 2010). However, this is not the only reason. The field of women’s and gender history is inherently comparative and itself invites, generates, and even requires a comparative framework to understand when, where, under what conditions, and in which forms patriarchy exists, persists, or weakens. This is especially true for Middle Eastern and North African contexts, where scholarship on gender is often directly pertinent to women’s rights activism (Booth 2003). Such scholarship is also...

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