At the same time, while more needs to be done to retrace more nuanced histories of governments, Asef Bayat (2013) has demonstrated the importance of the politics of the everyday in a region where governments have historically marginalized majority populations from the centers of power. How have women engaged in daily politics rather than mass uprisings? What is lost and whose voices are left out when historians focus on major “waves” in a non-Western context across several countries? Inspired by recent scholarship from Adak and Çagatay (2023), we seek to complicate wave periodization for understanding SWANA women’s movements to highlight both the complexity of state systems and the importance of considering political engagement occurring beyond the walls of formal institutions and organizations.

Given the heavy symbolic weight of women and their position in society due to Orientalism, last-ditch efforts of colonial powers to “modernize women,” and nationalism, women in the region have been tokenized without their consent or input while the status of women has become a site for debate among ideologues. How have women used their agency through both formal and informal social movements to move past this tokenization? For women in nations like Turkey and Egypt that did not fall under colonial rule after the First World War, they similarly had to negotiate regimes that used rhetoric of modernization and nationalism to assert their new national sovereignty. These states often impeded women’s independent feminist agendas or denied them all formal political rights (Badran 1995).

This panel additionally strives to consider women’s groups on their own terms, with limited reference to their depiction by Western actors (Hannun 2022). We will consider the following questions:

• Where have women’s movements forged transnational connections independent of Western networks? Or when involved in Western-dominated networks, how did they challenge or complicate persistent Orientalist rhetoric?
• Where did women organize beyond the purview of that state and moments of mass uprising? What impact did their activities have?
• When did the interests of women’s groups align with those of states?
• How did women activists fighting to advance women’s rights within the framework of state feminism manage to maintain some autonomy?
• When and where has women’s activism cut across class and generational barriers?