Ellen L. Fleischmann

Bio: Ellen L. Fleischmann is an academic researcher from University of Dayton. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Protestantism. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 15 publications receiving 186 citations. Previous affiliations of Ellen L. Fleischmann include University of Washington.

The Nation and Its "New" Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948

Abstract: Though they are almost completely absent from the historical record, Palestinian women were extensively involved in the unfolding national struggle in their country during the British mandate period. Led primarily by urban, educated women from the middle and upper classes of Arab society, Palestinian women struggled against British colonialism and against Jewish settlement by holding a national congress, meeting with government officials, smuggling arms, demonstrating, and participating in regional and international conferences. This book is the first comprehensive historical study of the emergence and development of the Palestinian women's movement in this important historical period. Drawing from little-studied source material including oral histories, newspapers, memoirs, and government documents, Ellen Fleischmann not only shows what these women accomplished within the political arena, but also explores the social, cultural, and economic contexts within which they operated. Charting the emergence of an indigenous feminism in Palestine, this work joins efforts to broaden European and American definitions of feminism by incorporating non-Western perspectives.

The Impact of American Protestant Missions in Lebanon on the Construction of Female Identity, c. 1860-1950

Abstract: Posing challenging questions in an attempt to answer what impact the American Protestant missionary encounter had on middle-class Syrian women, this article focuses on the experience of Syrian women with the American Presbyterian Mission in Lebanon. It discusses missionary educational institutions as the most important site of the encounter between missionaries and women in the Middle East. It further speculates as to what young Arab women took from their mission educations' ideas of gender, modernization and deculturization in order to shape their own destinies and to create their own sense of identity.

The Emergence of the Palestinian Women's Movement, 1929-39

Abstract: In 1929, Palestinian women inaugurated their involvement in organized political activism with the founding of a women9s movement. This article examines the first ten years of that movement, highlighting its contradictions, strategies, and achievements against the background of mounting political conflict and the Arab Revolt. Arguing that the movement, though not "feminist" in the contemporary sense, had a pronounced gender consciousness, the author shows how the women9s implicit critique of gender norms constituted a major element in their oppositional strategies and tactics.

‘Our Moslem sisters‘: Women of Greater Syria in the eyes of American protestant missionary women

Abstract: From the mid‐twentieth century, American Protestant missionary women played a role in attempting to reach their ‘Moslem sisters’ in Greater Syria through the various missionary institutions established in the region. This article examines part of the encounter between these two groups of women — particularly the murky and often ironic nature of the exchange, and how primarily single, Protestant American women focused much of their efforts on training young Arab Muslim women to be good wives and mothers. American Protestant missionary women, in assuming they were ‘uplifting’ the status of Middle Eastern women, were in most respects involved in an attempt to modernize the domestic dimension of the latter's identity and imprint upon it a particular cultural stamp.

"I only wish I had a home on this globe": Transnational Biography and Dr. Mary Eddy

Abstract: In 1893, Dr. Mary Eddy, an American Protestant missionary with the Presbyterian-run Syria Mission (based in what is present-day Lebanon), became the first woman to obtain a license to practice medicine in the Ottoman Empire. The daughter of missionaries and brought up in Syria, Dr. Eddy spent much of her adult life roaming the countryside of Greater Syria, alternately curing poor villagers' ills and praying for their souls. This article examines the life of Dr. Mary Eddy, exploring questions about the tensions and intersections between history, biography, and transnationalism that confront the historian when writing about the life of a transnational individual.

Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine : The Politics of National Commemoration

Abstract: Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.

Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, Agency

Abstract: The scholarship on gender in the Middle East takes two objectives as its mandate: first, to dismantle the stereotype of passive and powerless Muslim women and, second, to challenge the notion that Islam shapes women's condition in the same way in all places. The urgency of this endeavor is heightened by the fact that gender has come to demarcate battle lines in geopolitical struggles since September 11, 2001, and to occupy a central place in the discourse of international relations in regard to Muslim countries. To reflect the major developments in the field, I offer a critical analysis of the scholarship on issues that constitute the core of the intellectual discourse on gender in the Middle East. These include the critique of Orientalism past and present; the exploration of the diversity within Islam; the study of states and gender with respect to symbolic representations, institutions, and kin-based solidarities; the analysis of women's agency; and the debates surrounding feminism and the veil.