Tag: women’s history and memory

With the exception of a few famous female figures, history has long ignored the actions, struggles, and creativity of women, particularly during wartime. It wasn’t until the rise of feminist movements in the 1960s and 70s that a new field of research emerged, representing a true break with traditional historiography: the history of women and gender. This discipline had to earn its legitimacy in an academic world long dominated by men.

In southern Lebanon, women took part in resisting the Israeli occupation, assuming a wide range of roles: from military and political activities to transporting weapons and information, alongside social and organizational responsibilities. Yet many of their experiences have received little documentation or attention in historical accounts of the resistance. Drawing on oral histories, this report revisits women’s stories, shedding light on their contributions and experiences, aspects of which have remained absent from written history.

Founded in 1990 by five women in Istanbul, the Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation (WLICF) is a dynamic archival institution that is open to the public and that strives, through a wide range of activities, to ensure that women receive their rightful place in the history of Türkiye and beyond.

What has been recorded in the written history of Palestinian women prisoners does not preserve the stories of all the women and girls who have passed through Israeli prisons. Many of their experiences go undocumented after their release, remaining outside the archives. Among these untold stories is the testimony of sisters Fatma and Mouna, which sheds light on the experiences of Palestinian women who have found no place in the historical record.

From primary to secondary school, Tunisian students learn about the Code of Personal Status (CPS), the ban on polygamy, women’s political rights, and their entry into the workforce. It is a history of emancipation closely intertwined with that of independence and Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba. A narrative in which women remain spectators of history, even though, in reality, they were far from passive.

In Italy, women played a crucial role in the struggle against Nazism and Fascism between 1943 and 1945, yet official historical accounts have long downplayed, if not erased, their contributions. Honoring their memory is both a matter of justice and a necessity, particularly in a country still struggling to confront its past.

Today, İstiklal Street is known for its shops and tourists, but its past includes studios where women artists once worked. A 2022 feminist memory walk revisited their histories, from Armenian photographer Maryam Şahinyan, who documented Istanbul’s diverse communities, to Istanbul Greek painter İvi Stangali, who lost dozens of paintings following her deportation in 1964. Feminist researchers and storytellers are bringing these histories back into view, challenging their erasure through nationalism, forced displacement, patriarchy, and urban transformation.

From Catalonia to Scotland, European democracies are rehabilitating the thousands of women sacrificed on the pyres of the past. In France, where the misogynistic frenzy of the Ancien Régime decimated generations of “witches,” the state appears to respond with bureaucratic refusal to any form of historical justice. Faced with this institutional amnesia, the Basque village of Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle is putting up a fight: for nearly 20 years, its residents, local associations, and the municipal authorities have joined forces to rescue from oblivion the victims of a systemic violence that resonates painfully with today’s feminist struggles.

For generations, Kurdish women were discouraged or forbidden, by men from performing dengbêjî, a traditional form of storytelling through song. Confined to their homes, they kept the tradition alive even as male performers claimed some of their songs as their own. Today, women dengbêjs are reclaiming their place in the tradition.

Zoulikha Bekaddour welcomes us into her home in Algiers, surrounded by books and archives documenting Algeria’s war of independence, spread across her bookshelves and coffee table. Now 92, the former moudjahida (independence fighter) published Ils ont trahi notre combat ! Mémoires d’une rebelle dans la guerre et l’après-guerre (They Betrayed Our Struggle! Memoirs of a Rebel During and After the War) with Koukou Editions in 2014. As she recounts her life, other women emerge in her story: her fellow prisoners, activists of European origin, and women from rural areas and the maquis (the guerrilla resistance). Many remain faceless in collective memory, yet Zoulikha is determined to name them, to speak ...