Iraqis who lived through the anti-colonial struggle in the 1940s and the 1950s envisioned these two decades as a time of hope and revolutionary thoughts. The anti-British sentiments that swept the Iraqi street in the first half of the twentieth-century produced Iraqis as revolutionary subjects who thought of themselves as agents of history bringing about political independence, social justice, and gender reforms, through their activism. Revolutionary Iraqis looked forward to the future and aimed to break with the past. They thought of time as unfolding in a progressive, linear way, whereby the traditional past would give in to the revolutionary present, and the present would give in to the utopian future. Rather than spaces of social control and disciplinary technologies as imagined by Iraqi educators, the school and families emerged as an important arena in fueling anti-British sentiments. While these sensibilities revolved around Iraqi political landscape, they also informed perceptions of gender equality. Iraqi revolutionaries linked the problems facing Iraqi women to Iraq’s lack of genuine independence under the monarchy. They believed that women’s liberation would follow the liberation of Iraq from the yoke of colonialism, and that women’s subordination would come to an end once the socioeconomic order associated with imperialism was overthrown. Based on interviews and participant observation among Iraqis in London over the past fourteen years, this talk will discuss how the British imperial presence in Iraq gave rise to nationalist feelings for independence and to gender advocacy linked to anti-colonialism.