Rawda Makhoul

In “Peasant and Village life”, a 23-page chapter in Barakat’s “The Arab Society in the 20th Century” (The Arabic version), the word “women” is used in reference to traditional women’s roles: as mothers and as wives. This might be the case as well that throughout a chapter on Arab women in the 20th century, Barakat (2000), situates women permanently in a non-changing social structure, describing her as a built- in component of her family. Accordingly, women do not have any existence outside of it, as single or independent social actor. I relate to the gendered discourse that male Arab researchers used in writing the history of some of the Arab countries in my research.