No men live in the villages of Al-Samaha (Egypt) and Jinwar (Syria). Conceived by women for other (abused, abandoned, or widowed) women; for girls escaping violence and forced marriages; victims of sexism and patriarchal oppression; refugees of war and tyrannical governments, these insurgent communities as acts of resistance, a radical moment in the (post)colonial architectural imagination. This paper tells the story of how they were conceived; how they evolved; how they are managed; how they survived; the impact they have had on their contexts. The idea of a ‘women’s space’ as a haven of support, sisterhood and resistance makes frequent appearance in literature, and (more recently) in architectural theory. Writers such as Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin long imagined a future of “classless, ecology-minded, politically and socially ungoverned” utopias (Russ, 1995), where women break free from all domestic and social confinements, and “all the maps change.” (Le Guin, 1986). Umoja, Al-Samaha and Jinwar go a step further. They are the inaugural sites of a radical remapping of (socio-architectural) traditions in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East. In writing about these radical experiments, I maintain a critical consciousness; a vigilance in employing the instruments of historical, humanistic and cultural construction from which the modern struggle for women’s rights has frequently been victim. Focusing on the telling detail rather than detailed telling, my aim will be to bring the experiences of Al-Samaha and Jnwar to bear on our understanding of women’s (our) rights and struggles.