Women were at the forefronts of revolutionary movements that swept the Middle East at the turn of the twentieth century, just as they were in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, unlike their counterparts in the contemporary period, who have quickly captured the attention of both media and scholars, the early female revolutionaries in the region have been ignored for a long time despite the large number of scholarly works on the movements they participated in. Even though women’s involvements in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 have recently been the subject of a few studies, they have been analysed almost exclusively within the context of the society they operated in. On the other hand, women’s contributions to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire have yet to be thoroughly examined. This paper discusses women’s political activism in Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Iran in the early twentieth century from a comparative perspective, focusing on the ways in which women in these two societies contributed both to revolutionary politics and revolutionary discourse. Based mostly on primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and English, such as women’s periodicals, daily newspapers, biographies, memoirs, and parliamentary records, it provides an analysis of the various roles women played in shaping, enforcing, and resisting the radical transformation caused by the constitutional revolutions in Ottoman and Qajar Empires. This study demonstrates that women in Turkey and Iran became active participants in the construction of a new political regime, a new social order, and their own roles in the early twentieth century through new venues such printed media, associations, and street politics as well as new opportunities for education and employment. Analysing how ordinary women in two “traditional” Muslim empires transforming into “modern” nation-states caused change from the bottom up and forged a more explicit political identity, this paper not only sheds new light on the role of women in Turkish and Iranian history as agents of political and social change, but also helps us to better understand the dynamics and the nature of the constitutional movements in Turkey and Iran.