Much of what has been written about the Jordanian women's movement features recurring names, familiar institutions, and documented milestones. Yet behind this official narrative are other women who were present and played a part in pivotal moments, everyday conversations, and seemingly small acts that helped shape where we are today. Their stories, however, are rarely told. The prevailing narratives leave out experiences, details, and moments that contributed to shaping the very movement later chronicled in newspapers and articles. Not because these women lacked influence, but because they did not operate within established organizations, institutions, or initiatives whose work was documented at the time.

Women's experiences of struggle and resistance are not shaped solely in offices, projects, or reports. They also take shape in everyday life, in the ways women navigate social, legal, and familial restrictions. Nevertheless, written accounts tend to emerge from within institutions or through a select number of voices that have gained visibility for reasons not always connected to the actual extent of their influence. This reproduces an elitist narrative of the movement, overlooking the hierarchies and privileges that exist within it.

One study of the Jordanian women's movement notes that documented histories focus almost exclusively on political activism, while women who struggled in other ways are "often overlooked." This is not an incidental omission, but a recurring pattern in the writing of history.

These women, then, are not absent from history; they are absent from its documentation. This article seeks to address that absence by listening to the accounts of feminists who witnessed events and transformations that profoundly affected their lives and shaped their understanding of feminist issues. Although the oral transmission of stories is an ancient human practice, oral accounts have historically not been afforded the same credibility as written records. This disparity has never been neutral. Rather, it has contributed to the marginalization of entire groups, including women.

Oral history, therefore, should not be regarded as an emotional substitute for the rationality associated with historical methods, but as a different way of understanding history—one that raises a fundamental question: Who do we recognize as a historical actor, and what makes their story worthy of being told?

Within the feminist movement, this dynamic is reproduced with particular intensity. Accounts of the movement are predominantly written from within institutions or through voices that have already gained recognition, while the experiences of women working outside these structures remain confined to small circles or disappear when there is no one left to carry them forward. The result is an incomplete history of the movement.

In the 1970s, Abla and her friend Hanaa, may she rest in peace, had neither a car nor an office nor an institution bearing their names. Every day, they travelled by bus—their only means of transport, and an arduous one at the time—to a factory in Russeifa, where they taught women workers to read and write, sitting beside them and working through the alphabet letter by letter. This image of two women working without an organizational banner, a report, or a funder is precisely what is missing from the official narrative of Jordan's women's movement. Yet for Abla, it represents the very essence of activism: "Grassroots work is a fundamental pillar of collective struggle."

When asked where this awareness came from, Abla spoke of her mother: an illiterate woman who learned to read later in life and raised her children alone after her husband's early death. She describes her as "a model of independence, of seeking solutions, and of continuously rejecting every form of injustice." Abla's mother has no name in any official record and no presence in any report. Yet, for Abla, she is the root from which everything else can be understood.

In one of the rooms of the late Issam Abdul Hadi's home, women gathered regularly in what became known as the "Meeting of Women's Organizations in Jordan." These gatherings were not publicized, but they created a space for organizing a struggle that continued for years. During these meetings, women discussed politics, Arab and Palestinian affairs, and pressing issues affecting women in Jordan at the time, including education and political and economic participation. These gatherings played a role in advancing the women's movement during that period.

Abla spent decades struggling within Jordan's women's movement. She prefers the term "women's movement" over "feminist movement," not out of reservation, but because of a clear analytical position. In her view, the term "feminist" gained prominence with the developments of the 1990s and the agendas that followed the 1995 Beijing Conference, when women's issues increasingly came to be addressed through specialized frameworks, detached from their broader political context. She argues that this shift produced a form of specialized, elitist activism rather than a broad-based movement rooted in the realities of women across society.

For Abla, women's rights cannot be separated from political and economic systems. This partly explains why women like her are largely absent from official records: their work was simultaneously everyday, grassroots, and political, a combination that institutional documentation does not easily capture. She sums up this absence by saying: "The women's movement has been done an injustice. Very few books and very few articles have been published about it."

This pattern becomes especially apparent when we examine how the women's movement itself is defined. While some researchers describe it as "the work, whether coordinated or not, of all actors, organized in groups or acting as individuals, who engage with women's issues," documentation in practice remains largely confined to the most visible and institutionalized actors.

In this way, institutions, intentionally or otherwise, produce an elitist narrative of the movement that overlooks its internal hierarchies and privileges. Yet a more fundamental question remains: Who writes a narrative that eventually becomes accepted as unquestionable truth in the collective imagination? Who grants it the status of fact, legitimizes it, and sustains its authority?

After all, discourse does not emerge from a vacuum. It is often produced from a position that holds the power to shape it.

Razan's feminist consciousness did not begin within an institution. It began to take shape when she heard people around her say that the things she used to do with her twin brother—playing football, basketball, and playing in the street—were "not appropriate for a girl like you."

There was no defining incident or formally articulated feminist discourse, only a simple question that continued to follow her: Why?

In her twenties, this question led her to explore social media, then to more in-depth reading, including Hisham Sharabi's work on patriarchy. Eventually, it brought her into the streets, to the first solidarity demonstration she attended in Amman around five years ago. She was an individual who came to recognize that what she was experiencing and encountering on a screen called for action in public space.

Razan belongs to a generation with tools that were unavailable to Abla, including social media platforms, which she describes as making activism "transnational." Yet she is equally aware of their limitations: "Recognition always comes under the umbrella of an institution and in its name." This leads her to a deeper question: "Who actually has access to the tools of documentation in the first place?"

Razan considers the ability to write and articulate one's experiences a form of "privilege" that is neither universally accessible nor neutral. This is reinforced by an entrenched cultural assumption that "proper" writing must be in Modern Standard Arabic, leaving many lived experiences without a language capable of conveying them without losing something of their essence through editing or translation.

She also argues that the absence of a Jordanian feminist archive makes collective struggle longer and more difficult: "If I have no history to turn back to, I might end up repeating the mistakes of those who came before me."

Here, the gap in documentation is not merely a loss of memory; it becomes an obstacle to future struggles.

Decades separate Abla's and Razan's experiences, and the tools available to them could hardly be more different. Yet one pattern remains unchanged: activism takes place beyond institutions, but it is rarely recognized, accounted for, or documented.

The absence of these experiences from historical records has less to do with their significance than with who possesses the means to preserve and document them. History is produced not only through what happened, but also through what was recorded and retained. When institutions have the greatest capacity to archive, publish, and produce knowledge, experiences of activism outside institutional structures become more vulnerable to erasure, even when they have been integral to the movement itself.

A story that is not preserved cannot be passed on.

The question this article raises is not only who owns the narrative, but who gets to decide who was there in the first place. What happens to everything that goes undocumented? Does it disappear from history, or does it survive in other forms, beyond official records, in memories and stories that have yet to be written?

"It is heartbreaking that an entire generation could leave this world and take all its experiences to the grave," Abla said as she concluded our conversation.

Perhaps what is at stake today is not simply the recovery of the past, but its preservation before those who witnessed it are gone. For what remains undocumented may not disappear entirely, but it becomes far more vulnerable to being forgotten.

Translation Note: This blog was translated from Arabic into English with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). The translation aims to preserve the author’s original meaning, tone, and perspective.