Where Will the Troubled Women Go? : Fatima Mernissi’s Memoir of Growing up in the Moroccan Harem of her Childhood Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi was published in 1994 and made an immediate impact on our understanding of life in the harem and the women and men who lived within its confines. There are multiple ways that Mernissi’s memoir of her childhood made an important contribution to the scholarship of the harem. Her memoir was and remains a powerful rebuttal of the Orientalist view of the harem and of Arab/Muslim women generally. This must rank as one of the most important contributions to our understanding of harem life. Also, we do not have to imagine the voices of harem women whom we come to know through research in the archives. Instead there is Mernissi who speaks for herself and remembers the voices of the women with whom she lived. Her memoir provides scholars with first-hand information about an institution that in its essence cherishes and protects the privacy and intimate relationships of the men women and children living together as what Mernissi described as an extended family. Mernissi cites her father, who had multiple wives as well as eight concubines, who believed fervently in the hudud, or sacred frontier between men and women that must be respected. Trespassing, according to her father, had to be rejected. Nevertheless, the harem into which Mernissi was born in 1940 was on its way to extinction for multiple reasons including the influence of the French who had declared Morocco a protectorate, World War II and the Moroccan nationalists who advocated the end of seclusion and the veil. One of the strengths of the memoirs is that the harem is situated within the politics of the time and events outside the harem that begin to break down the hudud that Mernissi’s father believed was crucial to tranquility. Mernissi grew up to transgress this boundary. What my paper on Mernissi’s memoir will address is the link between her childhood experiences in the harem and her evolution into one of the best scholars of her generation, a feisty feminist and an internationally known and respected public intellectual.