As many scholars have observed, Westerners tend to view Islam through the prism of gender roles, with a particular focus on women's status and appearance. In U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights, historian Kelly J. Shannon studies American discourse and policies toward Islamic countries since 1979 and argues that US diplomacy has been increasingly shaped by the aim to protect Muslim women's rights. By examining how feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the media pressed American foreign-policymakers to “free Muslim women” (3), Shannon explains that we can see how soft power, specifically the consideration of human rights, has influenced US foreign policy over the past thirty years.

Shannon attempts to maintain a few tricky balances, including between Western perceptions and Islamic realities, and between regressive and progressive US discourses about Muslim women. In some places she succeeds in the balancing act and provides an objective and nuanced account, but in other areas the analysis lacks a critical lens. Early on, Shannon stakes out the position that the mistreatment of women in most Islamic countries is not merely a Western perception but is real. “This book is not an exercise in cultural relativism,” she states (12). Using focussed accounts of several episodes, including American media coverage of Iranian women during the Iranian Revolution and of Saudi women during the Gulf War, activism against female genital mutilation, and the Clinton administration's condemnation of the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women, Shannon seeks to show that, on the whole, Americans’ commitment to advancing Muslim women's rights was genuine and impactful. She recognizes that imperialist, orientalist, and Islamophobic attitudes were also in play, but the book's main thrust is to show a more progressive and positive side to American consciousness raising on the oppression suffered by Muslim women, and she rejects the argument that “American human rights activism was another form of U.S. imperialism” (6). Instead, Shannon claims, most of the people and organizations she studies were motivated by a belief in universal human rights, and they sought to empower Muslim women in foreign countries.

Shannon is to be commended for her discussions of transnational feminist NGOs, particularly the Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI) and Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), and of the international feminist conferences that were part of the United Nations Decade of Women (1975–85). The global feminist institution building that occurred in this period allowed these organizations to exert increasing influence over American public opinion as well as to create inroads into the US foreign-policymaking establishment. However, in her coverage of the disputes that broke out between Western feminists and Muslim women at these international conferences, Shannon could better explain the perspectives of Islamic feminists, for example their positive view of the hijab, and why they were frustrated by Western feminists.

I found the chapter on the Clinton administration and the Taliban to be the most compelling in supporting the book's overall argument. We learn how Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and the State Department, especially Secretary Madeleine Albright, were dedicated to promoting universal women's rights in America's exercise of power in Afghanistan. Under Clinton, the State Department established an Office of International Women's Issues which worked closely with NGOs such as SIGI and the Feminist Majority in a way that Shannon claims was unprecedented in American diplomacy. These non-state and state actors pushed the administration to take positions that went against US material interests in the region.

Shannon is on shakier ground when covering President George W. Bush. She attempts to argue that although Bush “abandoned Clinton's adoption of transnational feminists’ human rights discourse and often fell back upon imperialist, Islamophobic, and Orientalist frameworks”; took antifeminist positions at home; and was opportunistic in his use of rhetoric surrounding the liberation of Islamic women to justify his administration's intervention in the Middle East, he and First Lady Laura Bush genuinely embraced and promoted Muslim women's civil and political rights (159). She presents the contradictions as necessitating a “complex” understanding of the Bush administration's policies and ideas (158), but the analysis is often unconvincing.

The book does succeed in showing how non-state and state actors “kept Muslim women in [the American] public eye and reinforced the common wisdom that women in the Islamic world lacked rights” (41–42). Shannon's most important contribution is illuminating the growing importance of feminist NGOs in US policymaking circles in the late twentieth century. But Shannon often uncritically accepts and presents Americans’ broad-brush “common wisdom” that Islam oppresses women and tends to reify the concept of a homogeneous Islamic world. She often is not careful enough about distinguishing conservative Islam as a particular interpretation of Islam, and when she does, it feels like a hedge against her main claim that, rather than neo-imperialism, it was the “defense of women's human rights [that] increasingly became a legitimate expression of American identity on the world stage” (126).

On a final note, it is unfortunate that the press chose not to include a bibliography in the printed book; the author has taken the unusual step of providing the bibliography on her personal website.