My paper analyzes the writings of a female Iraqi Shi`i intellectual named Amina Bint Haydar al-Sadr, more commonly known by her pen name Bint al-Huda. Sister of the famous Shi`i philosopher Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Bint al-Huda was a prolific author of newspaper articles, religious treatises, novels, and short stories, none of which have been translated into English. Starting in 1960, she wrote a regular column on women's issues for the fledgling Islamist periodical al-Adhwa'. The timing of the journal's appearance coincided with a public controversy over the 1959 Iraqi Personal Status Law, which removed family law from the jurisdiction of religious authorities and brought it under control of the state. While in many ways Bint al-Huda's defense of Islamic family law echoes that made by other Muslim opponents of the personal status law, I submit that a close reading of her critiques, supplemented by an analysis of the interpersonal relationships depicted in her fictional works, reveals important differences. I argue that Bint al-Huda, who never married, was preoccupied with the problematic construction of marriage in modern secular law as a temporal event that marks the beginning of a new family, and a new life, for the woman (one that cannot be easily ended), and simultaneously demands the curtailment or erasure of her existing relationships with other people. In her political columns she argues that western family law codifies the exploitation (istighlal) of women by merging the property of husband and wife and then giving the man disproportionate rights over the so-called joint property created by the marriage, which, inter alia, makes divorce more difficult for women. At the same time, her fictional works criticize modern marriages that rupture a woman's ties with her female friends and her male siblings. I show that this preoccupation can not be read as some sort of anti-modern resistance to the destruction of historically "old" social bonds (tribal, extended, patrilineal, religious) by historically "new" ones (conjugal, nuclear, child-centered, secular), since Bint al-Huda both affirmed the modern institution of companionate marriage and criticized tendencies to privilege it over other equally modern types of relationality. Foremost among the latter were non-kin, intragenerational friendships among young women made possible by the expansion of education, literacy, print culture, and a bureaucratic/industrial labor force in the 20th century. The Shi`i female homosocial lifeworld represented by Bint al-Huda was neither "traditional" in a historical sense nor "private" in a domestic/familial sense.