In the period between Algeria’s Arab Spring-like October 1988 revolution and its gradual slide into a civil conflict starting in early 1992, the country experienced a brief but fleeting experiment with democracy that prompted dozens of political parties to form virtually overnight. Algerian joke-tellers, aficionados at mixing biting political critique with wit, quickly pounced on the opportunity to tease some of the new political organizations for their ideological stances. They particularly reveled in crafting puns on the nascent parties’ acronyms. Within this comedic framework, anonymous civilians joked that the Islamic Salvation Front or FIS’s common acronym actually stood for “femmes interdites de sortir,” French for “women forbidden from going out.” With this twist on the name of the country’s major Islamist party, anecdotists claimed that the FIS denied women the right to engage in public life. The creative comic minds behind this joke were hardly alone in their assessment of the Islamist organization. Left-leaning newspapers such as "Alger Républicain" proliferated images of FIS activists as overwhelmingly male and the supposed singular ideology of party as antithetical to women’s rights. Even after the Algerian military intervened to prevent the FIS from taking control of the national parliament in January 1992, portrayals of FIS actors as exclusively male have persisted. For instance, scholars have explained the rise of the FIS as a product of predominately youthful male anger at a long-standing, corrupt regime. Yet, assertions that the FIS wanted women out of the public sphere run counter to the reality that tens of thousands of Algerian women supported the FIS through a number of undertakings during the party’s short tenure as a licit organization. These activities included turning out in large numbers to vote for the party as well as publically marching and speaking in favor of the movement. This presentation will spotlight female participation in the wider FIS movement. Drawing upon contemporary press coverage of the party from 1989 to 1992 and oral history testimonies with former FIS partisans living abroad, it explores women FIS activists’ almost invisible public engagement at one of the most key points of shifting change in the country’s post-independence period. In doing so, this presentation aims to help historicize women’s involvement in political Islamist movements and parties throughout the region. In doing so, it will forward scholarship by writers like Monica Marks, Lila Abu-Lughod, and William Lawrence.