• 1 See Mohammed Harbi, Le FLN: mirage et réalité, des origines à la prise du pouvoir (1945 -1962), Par (...)
• 2 On this assumption, see Marnia Lazreg, «Citizenship and Gender in Algeria», in Suad Joseph (ed.), G (...)
• 3 On women’s involvement in the War of Independence, see Djamila Amrane, Les femmes algériennes dans (...)

1The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria marks an overdue contribution from gender history to a decades-long historiographical effort to complicate the story of Algerian decolonization beyond an official nationalist teleology.1 Rahnama demonstrates that, alongside a variety of futures being imagined between the First and Second World Wars, the so-called ‘woman question’ was an important site for envisioning a more modern Islam and a more liberated Algeria. She thus challenges the still-pervasive assumption that Algerian women only emerged as social and political subjects through their participation in the War of Independence.2 By decentering nationalism and focusing on the interwar period, Rahnama historicizes the better-known story of Algerian women’s participation in the armed liberation struggle.3 She paints a rich portrait of interwar colonial Algerian society marked by deep social change and diverse future imaginaries, with women at the center as participants and imagined subjects.

• 4 Sara Rahnama, The Future is Feminist, Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2023, p. 13.

2Rahnama situates her historical project within a theoretical reflection on the meaning of feminism in colonial settings. Inspired by intersectional and postcolonial gender theory, Rahnama moves beyond traditional categories of agency and resistance to adopt the more expansive notion of ‘feminist possibility’: bringing ‘feminist imagining and aspiration’ into the same analytic field as feminist movements and material changes in women’s conditions.4 She reckons with the complexity of how the dual constraints of colonialism and patriarchy could be simultaneously negotiated, upheld, and contested. Moreover, she recognizes feminist possibilities that were rooted in Islam and developed in conversation with MENA –Middle East and North Africa– women’s movements. In this way, The Future is Feminist challenges a historiography of gender and colonialism that has often neglected non-Western and non-secular women’s movements, and reduced gender to its interaction with the colonial state, ignoring local and regional contexts.

• 5 I follow Rahnama’s use of ‘Muslim’ to designate the colonized Algerian population.

3The Future is Feminist follows a loosely chronological structure with each chapter highlighting a different sphere in which Muslim women’s position was reordered in interwar Algerian society.5 As an introduction to the period and her primary source base, Rahnama’s first chapter looks at the rise of the Muslim press post-WW1, and the growing importance of the ‘woman question’ in these publications. She outlines a dynamic intellectual and associational life where predominantly male Muslim commentators imagined a more modern Algeria through its possibilities for women: drawing inspiration from Islam’s feminist potential and comparable developments across the MENA.

• 6 The classic account of veiling as response to colonialism is Frantz Fanon, « L’Algérie se dévoile » (...)

6In Chapter Four, Rahnama provides a fresh and thought-provoking approach to the history of women’s veiling in colonial Algeria: examining interwar debates about men’s hats and women’s hijabs alongside one another. As with women’s education or employment, clothing choices functioned as sites for defining the boundaries of Algerian modernity in the context of dramatic social change. By approaching clothing as a gendered practice, shaped by local, regional, and colonial contexts, Rahnama transcends the (post)colonial obsession with veiling as the embodiment of Muslim misogyny, complicates a historiography of veiling that has often reduced it to a linear response to colonialism, and makes an important contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on veiling as a lived practice rather than a static religious symbol.6

• 7 See, notably, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicit (...)

7In Chapter Five, Rahnama examines how French feminists in Algeria intervened in and made use of Muslim discourses about women to negotiate their own relationship with the state. By invoking essential feminine qualities of compassion and care, and claiming a unique intermediary position between the state and the colonized population, French feminists demanded their own right to vote and critiqued the material reality of Muslim women and children under colonialism. Rahnama’s analysis thus contributes to an ongoing scholarly complication of the traditional thesis of settler women as mere agents of empire.7 While these women never questioned colonial domination or maternalism, they nonetheless mobilized femininity to challenge colonial segregation and break from official state discourses.

• 8 On women and Algerian nationalism, especially post-1962, see Monique Gadant, Le nationalisme algéri (...)

8In her final chapter, Rahnama shifts to the post-WW2 period, focusing on letters written by Muslim women to the growing women’s press. Bridging her interwar analysis with the existing scholarship on women’s involvement in the Algerian War, Rahnama considers how the growing preponderance of nationalism over other future imaginaries in Algeria from 1945 impacted debates around women. Through the framework of the nation, men and, increasingly, women reimagined the same ideas of feminist possibility that had been expressed in the interwar period primarily by male Muslim reformists. However, while nationalism provided a new vocabulary for women to demand rights, and increasingly critique the behavior of Muslim men, it also brought with it new regimes of female respectability and a relegation of women’s concerns that would persist throughout the independence struggle and into post-independence Algerian society.8