In this paper, I will look at the issue of the production of Knowledge by Arab women through biographies, memoirs, autobiographies and the novel. I shall trace this trend of women’s expression back to the major biographies that shaped an early feminist consciousness especially in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria in the 19th century. By tracing the major concerns, themes and preoccupations of these biographies, I compare their political concerns with European biographies produced mainly before or around the same time all the way to the turn of the 20th century with the work of May Ziadah. Some of these common themes articulated by Jane Austen or Lucy Stone (among others) range from domestic exemplarity, male oppression, ideological commitment, from rebellion against the seclusion of women to the question of education of girls and the deconstruction of state/religious forms of authority and power. Moving from the early production of biographies usually serialized in women’s magazines, I will look at the significance of a shift to memoirs and the genre of the novel. I will specifically look at memoirs by Egyptian Huda Shaʿrāwī, the Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, the Palestinian Fadwa Ṭūqān and the war fiction of Huda Barakat and Hanan Al-Shaykh. My ultimate argument is to demonstrate by these examples how this act of “gendering history” has been a process of departing from contextually grounded biographies into setting the ground for new “modernist” articulations of the feminine and feminist self well exemplified in politically conscious memoirs, autobiographies and novels.