Provincialising Early Feminism: A View from the Middle East

‘Provincializing Europe’, derived from Dipesh Chakrabarty's work of that name, argued that an imagined ‘Europe’ was a founding myth for modernity. While not mentioning feminism, this analysis is a valuable starting point for tracing the path of the term ‘féminism’ from France to Britain to the Ottoman Empire and from the USA to the Arab world – in the contexts of each venue. This article provides a firm basis for comparing the advancement of women in the West and the Middle East. Some factors were similar, such as the influence of religious gender values, others differed, such as industrialisation.