‘Jamila, a beautiful call, as a beautiful name – Jamila, a call carrying the meaning of heroism’ (Al-Najjar & Mattar: 2017) – a poem recited by a schoolgirl welcoming the Algerian munadila[ii] Jamila Bouheired to Bahrain in 1958. During the mid-century era of anti-colonial liberation in the Arab world, Al-Najjar writes, families in Bahrain began to adopt the names of their political heroes for their children: for girls, this name was Jamila. This paper looks for the ‘many faces of Jamila’, by tracing an intergenerational lineage of women within movements for national liberation and revolutionary social transformation in Bahrain. It takes lead from the exciting array of recent scholarship that engages with new theoretical perspectives and Arabic-language sources largely yet-unexplored in English-language academia. While these works are reshaping the terrain of knowledge production on the Gulf, and the broader overlapping regions that it is part of, it is still not uncommon to read works that make little or no reference to the presence or participation of women in the making of history. By reading at the ‘social scale’ (Qato: 2019), this paper maps a through-line of women’s participation in movements for national liberation and social change through focussing on the lives of multiple generations of Bahraini munadilat from the 1950s-1970s. This paper argues that social histories which do not account for the role of women obscure our view into the ways in which transformation occurs, and how it permeates through the social fabric. Conceptualising the spatialisation of revolt to include sites and spaces beyond the street demonstration, it brings in figures and experiences that are otherwise often absent from the historical record. As well as thinking about how (and where) social movements are made, grow, and are sustained, this paper thinks through temporality. It argues that reading what happens beyond and before visible moments of rupture allows us to see and feel how those moments are replete with (and created by) connections that run across space and time. [i] From nidal, struggle, the feminine form of the word to describe a person who struggles or fights in the way of a cause or liberation, variously translated as ‘struggler,’ ‘militant,’ ‘activist,’ and ‘dissident’. The term is close to the idea of the ‘partisan’ of the French Résistance but lacks an English equivalent that captures its meaning, inferences and contextual use.