ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at womens roles in historical perspective and attempts to provide a foundation for answering them. It analyzes how the ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and anticolonial nationalism decisively shaped women's movements around the globe. The discussion of feminism in the colonial context continues with an analysis of the roots and impact of Arab feminism, perhaps one of the least understood phenomena in the Western world. The uprising in the American colonies in the late eighteenth century ushered in the modern age of revolutions. Although the Napoleonic code sought to instill the patriarchal order of ancient Rome, the ideas spawned by the French Revolution were not to disappear so easily. In Egypt and the Arab lands of West Asia, such as Lebanon, the Arab elite and the state authorities embraced policies of modernization and secularization that clashed with the existing patriarchal ideology. Societies have purveyed the obvious biological differences between men and women into sex-specific codes of social behavior.
