My Freedom

The purpose of this chapter is to examine women's organized involvement in a wide array of activism from a historical perspective to present-day experiences in the workplace and confronting social norms within Palestinian society. Richter-Devroe (2018) notes the historical prevalence of Palestinian women's activism: [Palestinian] women's political practices and the presentations, meanings, and framings that women give to their politics are different from men’s, and they also differ from conventional male-dominated politics. Studying women's alternative political expressions and their ways of doing politics thus sheds light not only on contemporary gendered political culture, but also on the forms, modes, and spaces of politics from below in Palestine and the contemporary Middle East more broadly…The Palestinian women's movement, for example, has a very long history, and has continuously relied on both collective formal activism and quotidian informal struggles…These women's experiences shed light on different modes and sites of political activism and can reveal alternative memories and histories, “from below.” As such, they constitute a needed and forceful counter-narrative to hegemonic Zionist historiography. And they can also complement, complicate, and challenge the homogeneity of hegemonic elite- and male-dominated Palestinian national or nationalist narratives. (p. 4 – 5)