ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to analyse personal as well as political predicament of Palestinian women in particular and Arab women in general by foregrounding how they had to negotiate between private and public spheres due to their familial and social constraints. Arab women writers like Fadwa Tuqan, Navel el-Sadawi, Raymonda Tawil and Asma Barlas wrote openly about patriarchy, gender bias, social restriction on women and so on which prevailed in the twentieth century, in books, collections of poetry and autobiographies. The emergence of feminist discourse in West Asia in the second half of the twentieth century countered the religious precepts and the condescending attitude of men towards women down the ages. While the genre of autobiography is said to be evoking the self through the narration of an individual’s life history, the autobiography of Tugan differs from the traditional mode of narration by depicting collective experiences of Palestinian women in general.
