Moroccan Women,

Activists, and Gender

Politics

Eve Sandberg and Kenza Aqertit

An Institutional Analysis

POLITICAL SCIENCE • GENDER STUDIES

“Among the most valuable aspects of Eve Sandberg and Kenza Aqertit’s new book,

Moroccan Women, Activists, and Gender Politics: An Institutional Analysis is their

revealing how very specific Moroccan women became women’s rights activists, how

they strategized and organized over several decades, and how they pushed the mon-

archy, male party leaders, judges, and fellow Moroccans to deeply rethink family,

modernization, and democracy.”

—Cynthia Enloe, Clark University, author of the newly updated

Bananas, Beaches, and Bases

“Sandberg and Aqertit combine a sophisticated (and innovative) theoretical frame-

work with nuanced empirical analysis. The Moroccan case is crucial; it is paradoxi-

cally unique and similar to other countries. As a result, Moroccan Women, Activists,

and Gender Politics will furnish scholars and analysts with valuable insights about an

important story of the institutional and societal transformation of gender in Morocco.

Their institutional analysis of gender is a framework that can and will be used to

investigate other countries that have experienced profound social reform and change.”

—Gregory White, Smith College, coeditor of

Journal of North African Studies

Eve Sandberg and Kenza Aqertit analyze how dedicated, smart, and politically effec-

tive Moroccan women worked together since Morocco’s independence to alter their

country’s entrenched gender institution of distinctive male and female obligations

and practices. In telling the story of these Moroccan gender activists, Sandberg and

Aqertit’s work is of interest to Middle East and North Africa (MENA) specialists, to

feminist and gender researchers, and to institutionalist scholars. Their work opera-

tionalizes and offers a template for studying change in a national gender institution

that can be adopted by practitioners and scholars in other national circumstances.

Eve Sandberg is chair of the Politics Department at Oberlin College.

Kenza Aqertit is county director in Nepal for the National Democratic

Institute (NDI).

Lexington BooksAn imprint ofRowman & Littlefield800-462-6420 • www.rowman.com

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