This book presents a dialogue between Western and Middle Eastern women that is often presumed never to have happened. Not only were women from the Middle East imagined to be shut up in a
harem all day without access to education, ideas or the outside world, but the extent to which Western women travelers were able to engage with women in the regions they visited has often
been overlooked. This pioneering collection provides substantial extracts from Ottoman, Egyptian and British and American writers - each with a biographical and literary introduction -
that trace the development of an intellectual, personal and critical dialogue between women over a period of accelerated social change marked by Arab nationalism and Egypt’s move to
independence, and the establishment of the Turkish Republic at the end of the Ottoman Empire. The ways in which the role of woman as either guardian of tradition or in the vanguard of
change was
hotly contested in both countries and by all sides of the political spectrum is explained in an editors’ introduction and photo-essay that set up the common themes of the collection.
