Noga Efrati outlines the first social and political history of women in Iraq during the periods of British occupation and British-backed Hashimite monarchy (1917-1958). She traces the harsh and long-lasting implications of British state building on Iraqi women, particularly their legal and political enshrinement as second-class citizens, and the struggle by women's rights activists to counter this precedent. Efrati then concludes with a discussion of post-Saddam Iraq and the women's associations now claiming their place in government. Finding common threads between these two generations of women, Efrati proves the current fight for gender equality is a wholly organic movement driven by a memory of oppression under the monarchy.

Efrati revisits the British strategy of efficient rule, largely adopted by the Iraqi government they erected and the consequent gender policy that emerged. The attempt to control Iraq through "authentic leaders," giving them legal and political powers, marginalized the interests of women, if not completely sacrificed their well-being altogether. Iraqi women refused to resign themselves to this fate. From the state's early days, they called out the biases of the Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR) and the absence of state intervention in matters of personal status and resisted women's disenfranchisement. Following the coup of 1958, their criticism helped precipitate the dissolution of the TCCDR and the ratification of the Personal Status Law. A new government gender discourse shaped by these past battles arose, yet the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, rather than cementing women's rights into law, unnervingly repeated British conduct. Pressured to secure order and reestablish a pro-Western Iraq, the Americans increasingly turned to the country's "authentic leaders" to maintain control while continuing to marginalize women. Efrati looks at the efforts of Iraqi women to preserve the progress they have made, utterly defeating the notion that members of their sex have been passive witnesses to history.