Recent scholarship on Iran by Golbarg Rekabtalaei and others emphasizes how Tehran from the 1940s to the 1970s became a “diasporic hub of highly diverse national, ethnic, religious and linguistic communities” that facilitated frequent social and cultural exchanges and encounters. Several processes that greatly contributed to what has been described as Tehran’s cosmopolitan milieu were the accelerated spread of American-style consumer capitalism post-WWII, the growth of Western-inspired advertising and magazine formats alongside an increasingly literate public, and a widespread zeal for modernization shared by the state and many in the middle and upper classes. While the cosmopolitan dimension of Tehrani culture has been extensively described in the realms of cinema and music especially, less attention has been dedicated to food culture. While many scholars have rightly highlighted the importance of new kitchen gadgets as part of the modernizing wave, food culture’s interaction with modernization discourses meant far more than time-saving appliances. This essay argues that cooking among the middle and upper classes furthered the diffusion of a cosmopolitan consumerism. Cooking sections in magazines, along with general food advertising, encouraged women, largely housewives and daughters, to view themselves as part of what Lauren Berlant calls an intimate public, “an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” – in this case, cooking. My research builds on the efforts of scholars in several subfields, such as Rekabtalaei’s exploration of Tehran’s cinematic cosmopolitanism and Houchang Chehabi’s work on culinary history. Unlike many previous studies, which focus heavily on the diaspora and act as cookbooks, I concentrate on the largely middle class, female readership of Zan-e Ruz, Iran’s most widely circulated women’s magazine of the 1960s and 1970s. I use the magazine’s regular “Cooking” section (later renamed “Cooking and Housekeeping”), along with memoirs and advertising from Zan-e Ruz and other publications, to demonstrate how Zan-e Ruz’s writers and editors encouraged an intimate public of consumers centered around the shared consumption of Iranian and cosmopolitan food and modern food and health trends. Eating and cooking served the common purposes of sustaining the body and fostering sociability, but they also allowed Iranians, particularly women, to build social capital by marking themselves as modern, health-conscious, and fashionable.

I use the 1966 Egyptian film, My Wife Is a General Director, to discuss the achievements and limitations of state feminism in Nasser Era Egypt. It tells the story of an ambitious working wife who got promoted to the position of the general director of a public agency -- only to realize that, in her new role, her husband is one of her subordinates. To evaluate the progressiveness of its message regarding women’s role, I examine it in a comparative perspective assessing its message against that of a Hollywood movie released in the same period: Kisses for My President, a 1964 film about a wife who was elected president of the United States, with her husband finding himself in the place of what would have typically been the First Lady. I argue that the Egyptian film is significantly more progressive with regard to women’s role in public compared to the American film, which was produced during the same period. Despite the important limitations of Egypt’s state feminism during the Nasser era, its emancipatory discourse still provided an empowering tool for many ambitious Egyptian women. One manifestation of this empowerment is that women were able to fall back on the state-endorsed discourse in the face of traditional voices that feared and resisted the idea of women’s liberation.

This paper examines normative discourses on modern womanhood in Turkey from 1946 to 1950, from the establishment of multi-party democracy to the opposition Democrat Party’s (DP) election victory against the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in 1950. Feminist historiography in Turkey understands the late 1940s as the consolidation of a “conservative consensus” in Turkey’s state feminist project. I challenge this narrative by scrutinizing the coherence of the state feminist project through an analysis of elite women organized in the Turkish Women’s Federation (TKB), and independent women intellectuals such as Sabiha Sertel, Safiye Erol and Suat Derviş. The TKB, which had been closed down by the CHP in 1935, was one of the civil society groups re-established in this period. Although the TKB stated that it would remain outside of politics, political realities had compelled them to be engaged with day-to-day politics. In fact, highly critical of the abandonment of militant secularism in the 1940s, the TKB assumed a pioneering role to “make” the ideal, modern Turkish woman. Although they had to act within very narrow political boundaries, they carefully criticized the CHP’s and DP’s appeals to Islamism. They frequently wrote on issues around public femininity including the wearing of chador, thriftlessness, employment and motherhood. Yet, TKB members overlapped with the state elites especially on issues such as anti-communism and policing of men and women’s bodies. On the other hand, political writings and popular novels by independent women intellectuals directed their critical gaze towards policing of public femininity and sexuality. Moreover, they problematized that the state elites, men and women, neglected the women of several class and status groups. They offered alternative narratives of women’s realities and brought women who were deliberately left outside the state’s or the TKB’s normative discourses into public debate. Relying on daily newspapers, the TKB’s main publishing organ, Kadın Gazetesi (Women’s Gazette), the TKB members’ memoirs, and popular novels, I argue the following: 1) The state feminist project has been hardly coherent in this period. It was fraught with contradictions and ambiguities due to ideological clashes, and domestic and international political developments. 2) The conventional wisdom about the period of 1935-1960 as “silent years of feminism” renders gendered and classed responses of elite women and independent women intellectuals to political transformations in the 1940s invisible.

For the largest part of the twentieth century and since the creation of the State of Great Lebanon in 1920, Tripoli, the once prominent Ottoman Province, was second, administratively and economically, to Beirut, the Capital city of Modern-day Lebanon. Although dire social, economic, and political circumstances affect all of Lebanon in the present day, these circumstances are multifold in this impoverished Lebanese and Mediterranean city where, according to the World Bank, more than 50% of the population live under the poverty line. These circumstances are affecting gender equality and economic independence for Tripolitan females. It is restricting women’s ability to have agency in personal and financial affairs. In this paper, I will argue that female inhabitants of Tripoli of the twenty-first century lost the leverage that could afford them agency and independence in matters related to their personal lives when they lost access to landed properties, either as owners or as wage earners. Looking back at the history of the city from two hundred years, recent research reveals a different picture of the family and female inhabitants of the city at a time of similar political and economic decline. According to Professor Beshara Doumani, “Tripoli’s propertied middle and working classes generally invested their time and energy in the vast green zone of irrigated orchards between the city and the coast.” This green zone was a highly commodified forest of cash-crops trees (citrus for export, mulberry for the silk production, and olive for olive oil and soap) which proximity allowed women much greater access to and management of commercially productive properties, especially irrigated orchards that were the main livelihood of the middling social groups in the city. Today the green zone completely disappeared from the landscape of Tripoli. The irrigated orchards and the olive groves gave way to upscale residential neighborhoods and luxurious apartment buildings. Female inhabitants of Tripoli, who relied for the longest time on income from horticulture and landed properties they have acquired either through inheritance or marriage, lost these main sources of support. Moreover, they can no longer count on steady income in the form of rent from urban real estate properties because legislation regulating the old lease contracts between landlords and tenants has been on hold for the past forty years or so for political reasons. Of course, the Lebanese pound's devaluation, to 80 percent since the inception of the October 2019 revolution, made matters even worse.