The Future is Feminist takes readers to late-colonial Algeria, exposing fierce debates in the 1920–1940s press over the gender map of a future society. Public discourse on the roles women were to play (indeed, were already playing) was central, Sara Rahnama argues, to the staging of an indigenous future, whatever that might look like. A “future” is open to imaginations, polemics, and debate – and polemics is what this book is about. Anchoring her intellectual history in the social and economic transitions of the interwar period, the author scrutinizes written commentary on women’s work, education, dress, and comportment. The resulting history reminds us that debates “about women” are also always “about men,” pairing discussion of (un)veiling with that on men’s changing headgear, and displaying male commentators’ various investments in defining women’s spaces and beings.

The book’s key archive is the Algerian press, Arabophone and Francophone, produced primarily by Muslims. “Muslim” is the appellation Rahnama chooses for “the Muslim population of colonial Algeria … because this is often how they called themselves” and differentiated themselves from French settlers (p. 3). Imagining futures, using the appellation “Muslim” rather than “Algerian,” also “refuses the assumption of the inevitability of a future, independent Algeria” (p. 3). Rahnama highlights a variety of opinions on local futures voiced by a rising Muslim intelligentsia with diverse training. Individuals often straddled or blurred “Muslim” and “French” categories of identity in their education, employment, personal lives, and outlooks. Importantly, Rahnama also listens to both “feminists and their detractors” (p. 8). Considering the whole sweep of periodical polemics on these issues, the author eschews generalization and foregrounds the voices of individuals, reminding us of the messiness of history.

Rahnama begins by taking readers on a tour of this discursive landscape. After World War I, emerging newspapers and magazines were attached to particular groups and tendencies, but still demonstrated the heterogeneity of discourse that periodical literature at its best manifests. Turning to the discursive focus on gender in society and nation, she first analyzes reactions to the growing visibility, post-World War I, of indigenous women as domestic workers in the city. To start with these workers is to de-center – at least temporarily – the elite, educated denizens of the press, while also highlighting a few of these working-class women as noted public activists. Women as domestic workers played havoc with socioeconomic boundaries: urban/rural, gender, class, and regional. Their visible presence on the streets of Algiers and Constantine, reconfiguring geographical spaces through internal migration, rendered them objects of anxious commentary. They made visible not only women’s need and ability to work outside their own domestic space but also the fragility of men’s labor opportunities, and hence of their economic and social status and psychic wellbeing. In Algeria, akin to other Arabophone societies, male commentators worried about how women’s waged work would threaten gender hierarchy in the family and, thus, masculine senses of self. Meanwhile, French-identified onlookers explained working-class women’s advent into waged work as an achievement of the colonial mission civilisatrice rather than an effect of the poverty resulting from colonial policies, male out-migration for service in the colonial army, and women wanting employment. Yvonne Mussot, a settler who edited the women’s page of an Oran newspaper, suggested that “Muslim women’s willingness to work outside the home, the resulting regular income they earned, and their proximity to Europeans were positive signs that the project to assimilate Algerian society was working” (p. 49). This “proximity,” of course, was as servants. This was a writer who professed herself “in solidarity with Muslims” (p. 49).

In the chapters on education and dress, we also see how seemingly antithetical views, shaped around dispositions of women’s bodies in contested political space, could exist side-by-side in the colonial discursive economy. While Muslim reformers and Sufi leaders sometimes expressed opposing views on where women belonged, both guided by and essential to their political agendas, Europeans (whether settlers, metropolitan feminists, or colonial officials) congratulated themselves on women’s presence in city streets while holding conveniently to stereotypes of Muslim women as endlessly sequestered at home. At the same time, Europeans also viewed artisanal training for girls as a “modernizing” achievement, even though it was but another way to bring women into the workforce in a subordinate capacity to serve the interests of the colonial state. One of the many strengths of The Future is Feminist is, while focusing on the indigenous press, its tracking of interventions by French feminists who argued for their own significance as supportive yet critical elements of the colonial regime. They called, for example, for a true academic education for girls instead of a curriculum based on weaving and mending. But these feminists were not revolutionaries. In fact, they saw themselves as the potentially most efficacious arm of the colonial state.

These feminists, while probably sincere in their concerns, used their alleged intimacy with Muslim women’s needs – their colonial street cred – to advance their own case for women suffrage in France. That Turkish and Egyptian women seemed to be ahead on the path to expanded political rights bothered these feminists. This is one of the fascinating aspects of a discursive triangulation demonstrated by Rahnama. For local Muslims, these societies to the east stood as exemplars of a solid, Islamically-defined modernity, and thus as alternatives to the Orientalist, paternalist, and often racist approach of French colonial authorities and settlers. The colonial regime in Algeria conveniently used Muslim men’s alleged attitudes on gender as an excuse not to establish girls’ schools. “French colonial claims about Muslim misogyny [were] the very ideological underpinnings of French empire in Algeria” (p. 13). Concomitantly, indigenous critiques of change in Algeria via attacks on French ways “inverted colonial attacks on Muslim patriarchy,” asserting patriarchal family patterns – at their heart, the control of women’s mobility – as a positive value, marker of local authenticity, and the only hedge against social chaos (p. 67). Similar stances had emerged elsewhere. Algeria’s status as a French colony and the French assimilationist perspective on colonization put a different twist on these familiar arguments of feminisms’ adversaries, be they colonial or indigenous.

Muslim reformists, local schoolteachers trained in French academies, and French feminists (metropolitan and settler) lambasted the French state as hypocritical and worse, while distinct groups had their own agendas and ideological or social limits, not to mention the individuals within them. Rahnama, for example, points out inconsistencies between discursive stances and deeds. There were elite men, for instance, who supported girls’ education, but not for their own daughters. Repeated themes and rhetoric surface from chapter to chapter, but Rahnama is careful not to schematize a complex, lively, and sometimes ambiguous rhetorical scene. Affective registers and silences evident in quoted passages humanize these writers, with their undoubted emotional and social investments in the futures they were sketching for themselves and their children.

For those versed in the 19th-century emergence of debates on gendered rights, roles, and spaces as key issues for elites in Egypt and across the Ottoman Empire, rhetorical patterns and polemical emphases here will sound familiar, albeit modulated by a different historical constellation. Such close-grained textual analysis is grounding for comparative thinking. It would be intriguing to know whether the consistent gestures to developments in Istanbul and Cairo, pointed out by Rahnama as a feature of local press discourse, were buttressed by serious familiarity with published writings of earlier feminists (and anti-feminists) in these sites. An Islamic grounding was central to early Arabophone feminisms further east, long before late 20th-century “Islamic feminism.” How did circulations of texts and arguments happen? Did Algerian Muslims read Egypt’s Malak Hifni Nasif, whose gradualist view on unveiling seems closely echoed in Algeria’s press several decades later? The go-to figures seem to have been outspoken male reformers such as Muhammad ʿAbduh and the reforming autocrats of Turkey and Iran, much in the news. As thinkers in Algeria gave readers arguments based on early Islamic history, did they draw on works of history and biography published elsewhere – and often written by women – that highlighted women’s visible roles in early Islamic history? Could they read novels published serially in Beirut or Cairo that sketched young female protagonists’ limited choices? Such questions raise issues of access to publications in contexts of colonial policing, with the British in Egypt and the French in Algeria. Rahnama mentions contemporaneous Tunisian and Egyptian periodicals as sources. It makes sense that writers in Algeria were observing their contemporaries, but were they also referencing the contours and logics of earlier debates to the east? Issues of women’s mobility, comportment, alleged sexual promiscuity, and “natural” roles, along with men’s street harassment, had long been in play amongst Arabophone intelligentsias, in similar rhetorical formulations to those quoted in this book. As Rahnama mentions, Egypt had seen fierce debates on the hijab which referred both to female seclusion and to veiling, and in both senses was argued over (in the late 1890s and circa 1910). In Algeria, the focus of debate appears to have been permutations of garb: the haik’s cultural authenticity versus the hijab’s Islamic authenticity (and flexibility, proponents argued). Was seclusion simply less relevant, given evident anxieties about women moving around the city? Such comparative questions aside, this book shows amply that icons, policies, and changes on the ground in Kemalist Turkey and postwar Egypt were touted by Algerians as useful beacons.

The diversity of perspectives elaborated by Rahnama pushes back against the era’s colonialist stereotypes of Muslim passivity and the nationalist teleology of the Algerian independence struggle, which subsequent research often accepted. That narrative tended to occlude women’s activism as political subjects before the war of independence. Emphasizing the earlier, more various discussions, Rahnama also traces how alternatives to anti-colonial nationalism came to look increasingly weak. But the voices of women in the 1940s press maintained a sense of loud participation in the struggle to define an Algerian future.