Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood
Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s1940s
By (author) Enaya Hammad Othman
Publication date:
30 September 2016Length of book:
242 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498509237
Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s is the first analytical study to examine the American Quaker educational enterprise in Palestine since its establishment in the late nineteenth century during the Ottoman rule and into the British Mandate period. This book uses the Friends Girls School as a site of interaction between Arab and American cultures to uncover how Quaker education was received, translated, internalized, and responded to by Palestinian students in order to change their position within their society’s structural power relations. It examines the influence of Quaker education on Palestinian women’s views of gender and nationalism. Quaker education, in addition to ongoing social and political transformations, produced mixed results in which many Palestinian women showed emancipatory desires to change their roles and responsibilities in either radical, moderate, or conservative ways. As many of their writings in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate, Quaker ideals of internationalism, peace, and nonviolent means in conflict resolution influenced the students’ advocacy for cultural nationalism, Arab unity across tribal and religious lines, and responsible citizenship.
Othman’s astute study is a valuable contribution to the field of Quaker missionary practice.