While feminist theorists have recognized the significance of the mother daughter relationship, this relationship has remained largely neglected in studies of autobiography of Arab women. This paper examines the mother-daughter relationship in autobiographies/ memoirs by Arab women writers who identify themselves, and are recognized publicly, as feminists. In Nawal El Saadawi’s A Daughter of Isis: The Autobigraphy of Nawal El Saadawi (Zed Books 1999), Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Memoir of a Harem Girlhood (Perseus Books 1994) and Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (Saqi 2005) daughters represent their mothers in different ways in their effort to construct their feminist selves in a patriarchal society. Some do so by rejecting their mothers as role models in their attempt to surpass them. In El Saadawi’s case, the author is so eager to contest the traditional concept of femininity expected of middle class Egyptian women that she present a condescending portrait of her mother that completely silences the voice of the latter and denies her subjectivity. Ahmed does something similar: identifying with her professional, western-educated father, the author, who is brought up in an upper class Egyptian household and who culturally identifies with Europe, distances herself from an Arabic-speaking mother with whom she literally does not have a shared language. Ahmed’s tenuous connection with the mother results in her total alienation from Arabic, her “mother” tongue and from her Arab identity more generally. Unlike El Saadawi and Ahmed, Mernissi and Makdisi self-consciously identify with their mothers and use their memoirs to actively investigate and reclaim their mothers’ heritage and their own relationship to modernity. Mernissi presents a portrait of a mother who, in her subtle ways, rebelled against confinement and the veil and planted the first feminist seeds in her young daughter, a daughter who ends up embracing modernity as a path for Muslim women’s liberation. Makdisi, on the other hand, uses her memoir to interrogate her liberal feminist views that modernity advanced women’s lives and to inscribe in her text her mother’s and grandmother’s histories and voices. By critically examining these feminists’ representations of their mothers, the paper sheds light on a neglected aspect of Arab women autobiography and complicates the relationship of Arab feminism and modernity-a relationship that continues to be a site of contestation and conflict.