Translation sample available.

In 1948, a society of peasants was transformed into one of refugees gathered in camps then meant to be provisional.  Today, four million men and women still make their lives in more than a dozen camps.  Palestinian women are obliged to look to their men for protection, yet the responsibilities of family and community, of making life as refugees bearable, have fallen squarely on the shoulders of women.  Family, which has always been politically important in Jordan, takes on a new importance in the Jordanian camps, where daily life, between Israeli suspicion and Arab manipulation, is a precarious affair.  Far from being passive spectators, four generations of female refugees since 1948 have defended their autonomy while preserving an image of uncontested masculine power, often by subverting it.

Author Abdallah uses information gathered firsthand in Jordan’s two Palestinian camps—Jabal Hussein in Amman and Gaza in Jérash--as well as the testimony of the Suleiman family to show how the history of exile and a refugee’s place in Jordanian society have been used to construct a “ideology of family” challenged by refugee women.  The ways in which these women both individually and collectively resist familial power might almost be called avant-garde with respect to feminist strategy, founded as they are on deepest tradition.  With valuable analysis and compelling research, Abdallah gives a human face and voice back to the dispossessed.  The very human story of a populist, grassroots feminism emerges from her political and social history of family in the Palestinian camps of Jordan.