Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women, 1800-1948 * By NANCY L. STOCKDALE

Abstract

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said did not discuss the contribution of women writers to the formation of Western images of Islam and the Middle East. There was an attempt by Billie Melman to fill this gap in her book Women’s Orients: Englishwomen and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (1992). She succeeded to a large extent. She pointed out that Lucy Garnett, for example, was the first ethnographer to have devoted a whole study to women in a Middle Eastern country, based on fieldwork in Turkey. In my book Perceptions of Islam in European Writings (2004), I wrote a chapter on perceptions of Muslim women in the Middle East in nineteenth-century French and English literature, including sections on women inside and outside the harem. We now have in Nancy Stockdale’s book a century and a half of acute observations on encounters between English and Palestinian women in a smaller area of the Middle East. The first impression that this book leaves is one of voluminous writings on the subject, painstakingly collected by the author. Written testimony is supplemented by oral history in the form of interviews she conducted in Jerusalem and Haifa in 1998 and 1999 with Arab and Jewish women who had been educated in English Protestant missionary schools during the British Mandate over Palestine. She had to delve deep into the memories of these women in order to find a Palestinian perspective on events taking place in their country.