ALSO AVAILABLE FROM FEMINIST PRESS
Contemporary Stories by Women from Iran
Edited by Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone
Translated by Sara Khalili & Faridoun Farrokh
This stunning collection of short stories captures the lives of women in Iran in the aftermath of the revolution. Evoking the enormous isolation of daily existence, and the persistence of a people living under a repressive regime, these literary gems reward us with an inside view of a turbulent and closed society.
Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone is a historian at the American University School of International Service.
Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan
Barbara Bick
This is not Charlie Wilson’s War. In richly detailed anecdotes, Walking the Precipice describes through a woman’s eyes the rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan. Bick provides a personal report about the country at the heart of the “War on Terror.”
In 1990, sixty-five-year-old activist and grandmother Barbara Bick traveled with a women’s delegation to Afghanistan for what she thought would be her last great adventure. Instead, while Mujahideen shelled Kabul, Bick forged deep friendships with her Afghan hosts. In the ensuing years, she watched with horror as the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan and instituted fiercely anti-woman policies. Eleven years later, at age 76, Bick returned to Afghanistan, this time to an even more dangerous terrain than Kabul: she traveled to the region controlled by the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia. She found herself in early September 2001 at a compound where Ahmad Shah Massoud, a leader of the Northern Alliance, was also staying. Bick walked out of the compound on September 9; minutes later Taliban infiltrators assassinated Massoud, a prelude to the al Qaeda attacks on the United States.
In the years that followed, the U.S. government became deeply involved in Afghanistan, and Bick decided to go back one more time, to see how women were faring under the new government. In 2004, when she returned, she was one of the few Western women able to bring years of experience to understanding the country’s trauma. Walking the Precipice gives new insight into the people, politics, and culture of a country that is on everyone’s radar—for its beauty, and for its tragic place history.
A longtime peace and human rights activist, BARBARA BICK worked for Women Strike for Peace, NEGAR-Support for Women of Afghanistan, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Institute of Women’s Policy Research, and the National Conference of State and Local Public Policies. She is the author of Culture and Politics and Walking the Precipice.
The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879-1947
Huda Shaarawi
Translated by Margot Badran.
Introduction by Margot Badran.
In this firsthand account of the private world of a harem in colonial Cairo, Shaarawi recalls her childhood and early adult life in the seclusion of an upper-class Egyptian household, including her marriage at age thirteen. Her subsequent separation from her husband gave her time for an extended formal education, as well as an unexpected taste of independence. Shaarawi’s feminist activism grew, along with her involvement in Egypt’s nationalist struggle, culminating in 1923 when she publicly removed her veil in a Cairo railroad station, a daring act of defiance.
HUDA SHAARAWI (1879-1947) was among the last generation of Egyptian women to live in the segregated world of the harem. Her feminist activism grew out of her involvement in Egypt’s nationalist struggle, and led to her founding of the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923.