About the Book
For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled
throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose
role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation
ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in
the Middle East. There were only children and married women.
Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a
few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in
order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue
professional goals. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and
women are attending Qur’anic schools—and using the training to
argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective.
And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment
protests in the Arab Spring. But their voices have not been heard.
Their stories have not been told.
In Syria before its civil warshe documents a complex society in the
midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the
role of women. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the
surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must
balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of
virtue. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women
who’ve found freedom in work outside the home. In Saudi Arabia
she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail
industry for the first time. In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she
examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising.
Deeply informed, heartfelt, and urgent, Good Daughters brings us a
new understanding of the changing Arab societies—from 9/11 to
Tahrir Square to the rise of ISIS—and gives voice to the remarkable
women at the forefront of this change.