Studies of gender during the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) tend to concentrate on the sexual violence that the French inflicted upon female freedom fighters who planted bombs in the European quarter of Algiers in 1956. This focus on the sensationalized image of these bombers, however, clouds our understanding of the contributions and commitment of women to the anticolonial struggle. This paper broadens our understanding of the nexus between gender and anticolonialism by examining Algerian women writers Assia Djebar and Zuhūr Wanīsī’s valorization of Muslim mothers’ gendered social practices and knowledge. Djebar and Wanīsī were both freedom fighters in the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN)—the vanguard revolutionary party that became the lynchpin of Algeria’s one-party system—who wrote for Algerian nationalist journals. Performing close readings of periodical archives, specifically Wanīsī’s 1955 article “al-maraʾ al-muslima wa al-ḥaraka al-kašafiyya” (“The Muslim Woman and the Scout Movement”, published in al-ḥayāẗ) and Djebar’s 1963 article « La poésie populaire algérienne depuis 1830 » (“Popular Algerian Poetry Since 1830”, published in Révolution africaine), this paper demonstrates how Djebar and Wanīsī emphasized the importance and necessity of women’s participation in the Algerian Revolution. While working alongside male FLN militants despite their patriarchal tendencies, they situated the Algerian Revolution in the longue durée history of Muslim women's role in military resistance: from the Siege of Mecca (692) to the Emir Abdelkader’s resistance movement (1832-1847). This paper argues that what distinguished Djebar and Wanīsī’s writing about women’s participation in resistance movements from that of their male counterparts, who tended to fixate on the figure of the young and attractive female urban bomber in describing women’s importance in the Algerian Revolution, was the importance they ascribed to mothers. It analyzes their transformation of the maternal archetype: from the mother calling upon the community to mourn the death of her children to the mother leading the celebration of her children’s sacrifice on behalf of the umma (community of Muslim believers). What bound the community together was the power of the maternal figure at the vanguard of the revolution who galvanized the community into taking collective action. However, Djebar and Wanīsī elevated the status of mothers without directly contradicting dominant historical discourses on the importance of women in the Algerian anticolonial struggle. This paper thus urges researchers to attend to marginal spaces of subversion, even in archives that appear at first to affirm dominant historical narratives.