In 1991, at the onset of a ferocious armed struggle in Algeria between rebel Islamist groups and the state commonly known as the “dark decade,” local caricaturist Dilem invented an Algerian everywoman he then placed in a number of contexts over the years. “Madame Algeria,” as he coined her, became a staple of his cartoons, bearing witness to the conflict’s worst tragedies and excoriating the political actors whom many Algerians blamed for the country’s turmoil. Yet, while this character supposedly stood in for the nation’s frustrated civilian majority, she fed into sexist tropes of older women as shrewish. “Madame Algeria” was one of many representations of Algerian women that predominately male journalists created to try to show that all women in the country actively resisted political Islamism. Ironically, by crafting these images, writers and artists actually marginalized female voices and distorted women’s role in the conflict. Indeed, national and international media outlets at the time described Algerian women as the ultimate opponents and victims of Islamic “fundamentalism.” Their interpretation of events was not entirely false; Algerian women on the whole suffered more from the war’s gendered violence than their male counterparts and many women protested against political Islamism and terrorism. However, these depictions constructed a dangerous binary whereby women were perennial victims of and activist against Islamism and terrorism, an interpretation of the conflict that clashed with its complex realities. Some women supported Islamist movements and engaged in terrorist activities while men also participated in anti-fundamentalist protests and were targeted for sexual violence. What were the stakes in portraying war-torn Algeria as a woman when gender roles in the conflict were not as clearly defined as writers and artists like Dilem would have observers believe? Drawing from contemporary media coverage of the war, this paper contends that such constructions were part of a larger trend of journalists both in the country and abroad portraying political Islam as inherently anti-women while positing secular opponents as intrinsically feminist. In doing so, it expands upon work, most notably by Monica Marks and Lila Abu-Lughod, concerning women’s roles in Islamist and terrorist movements as well as media treatment of Muslim women. Scholarship on Algeria’s “dark decade” has generally overlooked women’s engagement in the Islamist movement or armed groups. My presentation fills this gap in the historiography by providing a more nuanced analysis of gender roles and media biases during the conflict.