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In the global 1970s, women sought to consolidate their progress in terms of public presence and legal rights in the wake of the successes of revolutionary feminist movements of the 1960s. This coincided with what was arguably the peak of Third World solidarity with and among developing nations, a moment of anti-colonial, anti-imperial nationalism with strong socialist inclinations, and the advent of the human rights movement.1 Around the world women's movements were entangled in these cross-currents, dealing simultaneously with the demands of domestic politics, regional conflicts, and the international stage dominated by the Cold War.
Within this context, the case study of Iraqi women in the global 1970s highlights both the promises and disappointments of the regional and international trends of the era, particularly the backlashes to the expansion of women's rights. The Iraqi backlash in the early 1980s was perhaps more extreme owing to deepening authoritarianism and wartime conditions—the opposite perhaps of the Spanish experience in a context of democratization.2 Although effectively sidelined in a parallel and unequal branch of the single-party state, without decision-making power, elite Iraqi women nevertheless attempted to shape policy through (increasingly veiled) criticisms of male party leaders. This article is based on original empirical research into the organization's official Arabic-language publications, contextualized by declassified American diplomatic reports from the time and secondary literature using alternative approaches including ethnographic fieldwork and oral history. Scholars of women in Iraq have not yet closely read the official publications of the authorized women's movement. In doing so, I found that elite women in the early-to-mid-1970s were surprisingly public and forcefully vocal in their criticism of the Party, in particular of the Party's failure to live up to its promises of progressivism.
Yet these official spaces for advocacy narrowed as Saddam Hussein came to power, and the Party and the state increasingly began to serve him personally. The sole legal Iraqi women's organization in the early 1970s pressed the state to narrow the gap between rhetoric and reality, particularly in employing women. The Iraqi state, at a time of economic plenty (thanks to burgeoning oil wealth), needed women for their labor, so interests converged for a time. This article highlights both the opportunities and the perils of the patriarchal bargain in the...