¹ Karmi, Ghada, In Search of Fatima (London: Verso, 2002), 50–51Google Scholar.

² Ibid., 23.

³ Ibid., 30–31.

⁴ Ibid., 23.

⁵ On the history and development of this “new Arab woman,” see, for example, Abu-Lughod, Lila, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russell, Mona, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863–1922 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fleischmann, Ellen, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pollard, Lisa, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶ Seikaly, Sherene, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 14Google Scholar.

⁷ I borrow this term from Banerjee, Swapna, in “Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (2004): 681–708, 694CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Stoler, Ann L. and Strassler, Karen use this term in “Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 4–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 10.

⁹ On the celebration and memory of the Palestinian peasantry, see Sayigh, Rosemary, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 1979)Google Scholar; and Swedenburg, Ted, “The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier,” Anthropological Quarterly 63, no. 1 (1990): 18–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ For example, Khater, Akram, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Watenpaugh, Keith, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abou-Hodeib, Toufoul, A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Watenpaugh, Being Modern, 2.

¹² Ibid., 8; Shechter, Relli, ed., Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryzova, Lucie, The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seikaly, Men of Capital; Abou-Hodeib, Taste for Home.

¹³ For example, Khater, Inventing Home; Shechter, Transitions; Watenpaugh, Being Modern; and Abou-Hodeib, Taste for Home. Sherene Seikaly is an important exception. In Men of Capital (72–74), Seikaly analyzes Salwa Sa‘id's domestic reform advice on mistress-maid relations as a way to understand the Palestinian “women of thrift.” Ray Jureidini also highlights the historiographical absence of domestic workers in his study, “In the Shadows of Family Life: Toward a History of Domestic Service in Lebanon,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 5, no. 3 (2009): 74–101.

¹⁴ As Rachelle Taqqu has shown, the transition to wage labor was accompanied by changes in social loyalties and identities of fellah workers. See “Peasants into Workmen: Internal Labor Migration and the Arab Village Community under the Mandate,” in Palestinian Society and Politics, ed. Joel S. Migdal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 261–86.

¹⁵ As Rana Barakat details, as Jerusalem became home to a growing number of nonelite Palestinians, the city witnessed dramatic demographic and social shifts; “The Jerusalem Fellah: Popular Politics in Mandate-Era Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 41, no. 1 (2016): 7–19, quote on 9.

¹⁶ Of these, 6,238 were female and 3,908 were male. Mills, E., Palestine Census, 1931, Part I: Report, vol. 1 (Alexandria, VA: Whitehead Morris, 1933), 299Google Scholar. Just under 1.8 percent of the settled population in Palestine was economically supported by paid domestic service work, as either “earners” or “dependents.” By religion, 1.17 percent of the Muslim population, 3.02 percent of the Jewish population, and 4.11 percent of the Christian population was supported by domestic service work (316).

¹⁷ In 1931, Muslim women made up 39.2 percent of all Muslim domestic workers in Palestine; by contrast, Muslim women made up 7.2 percent of all Muslim workers in “agriculture and raw materials” and 3.9 percent of all Muslim workers in “industry, trade, and transport.” Among Christians, 59.5 percent of the domestic service workers were women; among Jews, 82.9 percent of the domestic service workers were women. Himadeh, Sa‘id B., ed., Economic Organization of Palestine (Beirut: American Press, 1938), 35Google Scholar.

¹⁸ On the exclusion of domestic workers from the working class and histories of the working class in Britain, see Todd, Selina, “Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950,” Past and Present 203, no. 1 (2009), 181–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Steedman, Carolyn, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent critique of this narrow understanding of labor history, see Christian G. De Vito, Juliane Schiel, and Matthias van Rossum, “From Bondage to Precariousness? New Perspectives on Labor and Social History,” Journal of Social History (forthcoming).

²⁰ Todd, “Domestic Service,” 189.

²¹ Thompson, Elizabeth, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 161, 281Google Scholar.

²² Domestic workers also came from poor urban households. See Davis, Rochelle, “The Growth of the Western Communities, 1917–1948,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and Their Fate in the War, ed. Tamari, Salim (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies and Badil Resource Center, 1999), 32–66Google Scholar, quote on 34. On the Palestinian peasant economy, see, for instance, Nadan, Amos, The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

²³ See, for example, Robinson, Olivia, “Traveling Ayahs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Global Networks and Mobilization of Agency,” History Workshop Journal 86 (2018): 44–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Heinz, Annelise and LaCouture, Elizabeth, eds., “Unsettling Domesticities: New Histories of Home in Global Contexts,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1246–336CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For sociological and anthropological studies on migrant domestic workers in the contemporary Arab world, see Jureidini, Ray, “Sexuality and the Servant: An Exploration of Arab Images of the Sexuality of Domestic Maids Living in the Household,” in Sexuality in the Arab World, ed. Khalaf, S. and Gagnon, J. (London: Saqi Books, 2006)Google Scholar; Ahmad, Attiya, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sumayya Kassamali, “Migrant Worker Lifeworlds of Beirut” (diss., Columbia University, 2017).

²⁴ See Stoler, Ann Laura, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 833CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁵ Here I follow the approach of Banerjee, “Down Memory Lane,” 683. I cannot know how the experiences of domestic workers might “speak back” to the archive of elite figures presented here. As Stoler and Strassler write, scholars often assume that domestic service typified the subaltern condition, and they make assumptions about the home and domestic work as a site of “intimate humiliation, contempt and disdain” in which “subaltern power accrues.” But in their research on the memories of Indonesian domestic servants in Dutch colonial homes, Stoler and Strassler found that the former servants’ testimony did not contain the affect expressed in colonial memoirs or assumed in scholarly works. As they write: “Accounts of former house servants often speak past, rather than back to, the colonial archive and the nostalgic memories of their Dutch employers.” See “Castings for the Colonial,” 11.

²⁶ McGowan, Abigail, “The Materials of Home: Studying Domesticity in Late Colonial India,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1302–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ As writes, Antoinette Burton, “Domesticity has always been a work in progress: unfinished business, in the sense of incomplete and aspirational”; “Toward Unsettling Histories of Domesticity,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1332–36Google Scholar, quote on 1332.

²⁸ Radai, Itamar, “The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class under the British Mandate, 1920–39,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 3 (2016): 487–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 490.

²⁹ Seikaly, Sherene, “Men of Capital in Mandate Palestine,” Rethinking Marxism 30, no. 3 (2018): 393–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 401.

³⁰ Ibid. Seikaly terms this group the “middling class” and “men of capital.” See also Tamari, Salim, Mountain Against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Many scholars have adopted the term efendiyya to describe the men of this emerging middle class in the Arab East. The efendiyya in Egypt, as Lucie Ryzova writes, graduated from modern educational institutions and proclaimed themselves “modern.” Ryzova, The Age of the Efendiyya; Jacob, Wilson Chacko, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ McGowan, “Materials of Home,” 1307.

³² Bernstein, Deborah and Hasisi, Badi, “‘Buy and Promote the National Cause’: Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestinian Society,” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (2008): 127–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 131.

³³ Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 489–90.

³⁴ Ibid., 493.

³⁵ Seikaly, Men of Capital, 58.

³⁶ Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 490. For example, on the role of the American University of Beirut in educating Arab civil servants in the British and French Mandates, see Kalisman, Hilary Falb, “Bursary Scholars at the American University of Beirut: Living and Practising Arab Unity,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 4 (2015): 599–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Examples include Qasim Amin, Butrus al-Bustani, and Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi. Greenberg, Ela, Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow: Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 2Google Scholar.

³⁸ Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 494, 497.

³⁹ Ibid., 497. See Seikaly (Men of Capital, 58) on the importance of “Eastern” values in Palestinian consumption. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib shows how the Arab middle class in Beirut attempted to distinguish itself from both the wealthier classes and the ifranji, or European, culture; “Taste and Class in Late Ottoman Beirut,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 3 (2011): 475–92, quote on 476.

⁴⁰ Seikaly, Men of Capital, 55. As Abou-Hodeib argues, the criticism of wealthier classes by Arab intellectuals contrasts with Pierre Bourdieu's conception of “downward self-demarcation,” in which the working class functions as the “negative reference point”; “Taste and Class,” 481.

⁴¹ Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 476.

⁴² Radai, “Rise and Fall,” 490–92. On the “New City” versus the “Old City” of Jerusalem in mandatory Palestine, see Davis, Rochelle, “Growing Up Palestinian in Jerusalem before 1948: Childhood Memories of Communal Life, Education, and Political Awareness,” in Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation 1917–Present, ed. Jayyusi, Lena (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2015), 187–210Google Scholar.

⁴³ On the “new” woman's duties in the home, see Mona Russell, “Modernity, National Identity, and Consumerism: Visions of the Egyptian Home, 1805–1922,” in Shechter, Transitions in Domestic Consumption 43. Notably, some articles in women's journals also questioned and criticized the public-private dichotomy and the “cult of domesticity.” See Khater, Inventing Home, 16.

⁴⁴ “Al Sama’ al-Ula,” pt. 1, al-Hasna’, June 1910, 12, cited in Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 479.

⁴⁵ Seikaly, Men of Capital, 53.

⁴⁶ On this paradox, see Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 8.

⁴⁷ Quoted in Seikaly, Men of Capital, 57 (emphasis added).

⁴⁸ For a list of women's magazines published in the first decade of the 20th century, see Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 294–95, and Khater, Inventing Home, 224n88.

⁴⁹ Al-Bayt al-‘Arabi al-Jadid can also be translated as “The new Arab house.” Andrea Stanton argues that the publication of Sa‘id's program in Filastin was part of a conscious plan to promote a “modern, progressive, urban, and bourgeois identity for Arab Palestine”; “This Is Jerusalem Calling”: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), 142.

⁵⁰ Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 91–94.

⁵¹ Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 489n17. See also Jiha, Michel, Julia Tu'ma Dimashqiyya (Beirut: Riad al-Rayyes Books, 2003)Google Scholar; and Abou-Hodeib, Taste for Home, 115–17.

⁵² Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 121.

⁵³ For instance, “Marriage in China,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 1, no. 4 (1921): 112; “The Syrian Family,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 1, no. 5 (1921): 143; “The Turkish Woman,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 1, no. 5 (1921): 194; “The New Woman in the New Europe,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 3 (1922): 78; “The Woman in Japan,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 126; and “The Women's Awakening in Brazil,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 5 (1922): 155.

⁵⁴ Stanton, “Jerusalem Calling,” 143.

⁵⁵ Filastin, 26 January 1941, quoted in Seikaly, Men of Capital, 62.

⁵⁶ As Stanton notes, Sa‘id's imagined audience had to be able to afford a radio to tune into her show; “Jerusalem Calling,” 145.

⁵⁷ Shahid, Serene Husseini, Jerusalem Memories (Beirut: Naufal, 2000), 48–53Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Sakakini, Hala, Jerusalem and I: A Personal Record, 2nd ed. (Amman: n.p., 1990), 34Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Filastin, 9 March 1941, 1.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² “Al-Bayt,” al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ With regard to the salary problem, Sa‘id advised cooperating with the “foreigners,” especially the British, to designate an agreed-upon salary for each service requested. She also suggested that articles be written on this subject in British newspapers; Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2. On Arab domestic workers in British homes, see Sherman, A. J., Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 56–58Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 5 (1925): 211.

⁶⁸ Ibid. The use of “kingdom” here is noteworthy: it assumes that the housewife, as the “queen” of this kingdom, is a fair yet still absolute ruler. The reformers gave housewives very detailed instructions. For example, if a servant died and left behind a poor family, the housewife was to give the family a full month's salary; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165, and al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 7 (1925): 293–94. If the mistress wanted to fire a servant, she must notify the servant a full month ahead of time; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁶⁹ Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

⁷⁰ A-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁷¹ Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

⁷² Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

⁷³ Brokerage houses, the article stated, had become centers for “traders of the white slave”; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 7 (1925): 293–94.

⁷⁴ Ibid. It was advised that the uniforms of servants be “simple and clean”; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

⁷⁵ The housewife could ask about the maid's family, her health, and where she had worked previously; al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 7 (1925): 293–94. On the specific duties of servants, see al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 9 (1925): 379–80.

⁷⁶ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2. Housewives were advised to remember their maids’ humanity, always use polite language, and give small rewards for jobs well done. See al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

⁷⁹ Filastin, 16 March 1941, 1–2.

⁸⁰ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 8 (1925): 345.

⁸³ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁸⁴ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

⁸⁵ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 10 (1925): 431–32.

⁸⁶ Filastin, 9 March 1941, 1, 3. Sa‘id was, according to Seikaly (Men of Capital, 62), “a relentless Anglophile” who praised English conduct and taste. Scholars have noted the influence of European and American domestic ideals on Arab middle-class ideals. See, for example, Khater, Inventing Home, and Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, ch. 2.

⁸⁷ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁸⁸ Ibid. Frank Crane was an American Presbyterian minister who published articles on life advice, ethics, and women's roles. See, for example, Four Minute Essays (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1919). On the topic of the translation and introduction of Western domestic reform literature into other languages and cultures, see LaCouture, Elizabeth, “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1278–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ Ibid. Similar points are made in Filastin, 23 March 1941, 2; and al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 5 (1925): 211.

⁹² Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁹³ The emphasis on maintaining this boundary was perhaps heightened by the fact that many in the new middle class had not had a family history of servant keeping. See Todd, “Domestic Service,” 193.

⁹⁴ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 5, no. 4 (1925): 165.

⁹⁵ Al-Mar'a al-Jadida 2, no. 4 (1922): 118.

⁹⁶ Seikaly, Men of Capital, 55.

⁹⁷ “Al-Mar'a al-Jadida,” al-Akhlaq, 1 February 1933, 40–43. There is a flawed assumption, as Sibylle Meyer notes, that European middle-class women left all of the domestic work to maids and servants. So too was the case with Arab middle-class women. In reality, as Meyer writes, “keeping up bourgeois appearances forced the invisibility of housework. Making this work invisible became in itself work.” See “The Tiresome Work of Conspicuous Leisure: On the Domestic Duties of the Wives of Civil Servants in the German Empire (1871–1918),” in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 164.

⁹⁸ Omnia El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 126–70.

⁹⁹ Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim, Surakh fi Layl Tawil (Baghdad: Matba‘at al-‘Ani, 1955), 26Google Scholar. The translations used here are found in William Tamplin, trans., Cry in a Long Night (forthcoming).

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 11–12.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 37.

¹⁰² Roxane also seeks to become a “new woman” by marrying Amin. The phrase “new woman” is used in the text. Ibid., 85–86.

¹⁰³ Banerjee, “Down Memory Lane,” 688.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 694. See also Banerjee, Swapna, Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ Stoler and Strassler, “Castings for the Colonial,” 9.

¹⁰⁶ For a historian who uses memoirs as primary sources, see Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an example of works that interrogate Palestinian memory, see Slyomovics, Susan, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestine Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On the interrogation of Palestinian memory and the home, see Naili, Falestin, “Memories of Home and Stories of Displacement: The Women of Artas and the ‘Peasant Past,’” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 4 (2009): 63–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Saad, Dima, “Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile,” Jerusalem Quarterly 80 (2019): 57–71Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ DeYoung, Terri, “The Disguises of the Mind: Recent Palestinian Memoirs,” Review of Middle East Studies 51, no. 1 (2017): 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 7.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 8.

¹⁰⁹ Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 194.

¹¹⁰ Hamlett, Jane, “‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910,” Gender and History 21, no. 3 (2009): 576–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 580. As Falestin Naili writes regarding Palestinian female refugees from the village of Artas now living in eastern Amman, “Physical displacement . . . tends to hide temporal displacement, and often what is longed for is not only the homeland but also the time of one's childhood and youth”; “Memories of Home and Stories of Displacement,” 72.

¹¹¹ On Khalil Sakakini, see Bawalsa, Nadim, “Sakakini Defrocked,” Jerusalem Quarterly 42 (2010): 5–25Google Scholar.

¹¹² Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 61.

¹¹³ Abou-Hodeib, “Taste and Class,” 477. See also Abou-Hodeib, Toufoul, “The Material Life of the Ottoman Middle Class,” History Compass 10, no. 8 (2012): 584–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁴ Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 9.

¹¹⁵ Some Jews saw hiring Palestinian Arab domestic workers as a potential mode of Jewish-Arab cooperation. Gerda Arlosoroff-Goldberg wrote that Arab maids in Jewish homes would “broaden the horizons” of Arab maids and in turn, if the Arab maids learned European manners, more understanding could be established between “one woman and another”; “Comments to the ‘Palestinian’ Women's Movement,” Ha-Isha 2 (1929), cited in Segev, Tom, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 216Google Scholar. In other cases, however, Zionist labor organizations heavily policed the presence of Palestinian Arab domestic workers in Jewish homes, as one letter to the editor in the Hebrew newspaper Davar highlights. The writer, a Jewish woman who employed two Arab domestic workers in her home, condemned the audacity of two Jewish women from the Zionist Council of Women Workers (moetzet ha-poelot) who came to her house accusing her of, and scolding her for, hiring Arab maids. The women's aim was to “protect” the Hebrew economy (Davar, 14 September 1936). On Jewish domestic workers in Palestine, see Bernstein, Deborah S., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 235–56Google Scholar.

¹¹⁶ Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 61.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 31.

¹¹⁸ I am grateful to the IJMES anonymous reviewer for making this point.

¹¹⁹ Salem, Salwa (with Maritano, Laura), The Wind in My Hair, trans. Freccero, Yvonne (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 9.

¹²¹ The English translation of The Wind in My Hair spells this name as “Fatma.” It is interesting to note that many of the maids mentioned in these memoirs were named “Fatma” or “Fatima.” In the North African colonial context, “Fatma” became a derogatory, generic name used by French colonists for Arab maids. There is no clear indication, however, that the authors cited in this article are using pseudonyms or that the real names of the domestic workers were anything other than the names provided by the authors. See Salhi, Zahia Smail, “Algerian Women as Agents of Change and Social Cohesion,” in Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change, ed. Sadiqi, Fatima and Ennaji, Moha (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 151Google Scholar.

¹²² Salem, Wind in My Hair, 11.

¹²³ Ibid.

¹²⁴ Ibid.

¹²⁵ Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 15.

¹²⁶ Ibid., 16.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

¹²⁸ Ibid.

¹²⁹ Ibid., 24.

¹³⁰ Ibid., 18.

¹³¹ Ibid., 25.

¹³² Ibid., 15.

¹³³ Ibid.

¹³⁴ Ibid.

¹³⁵ Ibid., 25.

¹³⁶ Ibid., 52.

¹³⁷ Ibid., 53, 56.

¹³⁸ Tuqan, Fadwa, A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography, trans. Kenny, Olive (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1990), 64Google Scholar.

¹³⁹ Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 23.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 23–24. On the significance of clothing, and specifically the thawb, for post-1948 Palestinian identity, see, for instance, Sherwell, Tina, “Palestinian Costume, the Intifada and the Gendering of Nationalist Discourse,” Journal of Gender Studies 5, no. 3 (1996): 293–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abu-Ghazaleh, Faida N., Ethnic Identity of Palestinian Immigrants in the United States: The Role of Cultural Material Artifacts (El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly), 2011Google Scholar.

¹⁴¹ Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 24–25. The spatial boundary may have also been a result of the different eating customs of urbanites and villagers. I thank the IJMES anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

¹⁴² Domestic workers who lived in urban areas also exposed elite urban children to the lower-class urban neighborhoods.

¹⁴³ Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 17.

¹⁴⁴ Karmi, Ghada, Return: A Palestinian Memoir (London: Verso, 2015), 262Google Scholar. The last time Ghada saw Fatima was in 1948, when the Karmi family left Jerusalem for Damascus. Fatima and her brother Muhammad stayed behind, and Fatima looked after the Karmis’ house in Qatamon in anticipation of the Karmis’ return following the war. The Karmis did not return, nor did they hear any news about Fatima's fate in the war and its aftermath. As an adult, in 2005, Ghada Karmi returned to what had become Israel and the West Bank in search of more information about Fatima. She eventually found Fatima's nephew, who told her that Fatima and her daughters fled from al-Maliha to Bethlehem in the summer of 1948 (262–72).

¹⁴⁵ Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 18.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid., 19.

¹⁴⁷ According to Ghada's father, if a man wore round trousers it meant he had peasant origins, for when peasants traded their traditional loose trousers for urban clothes, they did not learn how to correctly iron their pants; ibid.

¹⁴⁸ Rose, John H. Melkon, Armenians of Jerusalem: Memories of Life in Palestine (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993), 101Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid.

¹⁵⁰ Nammar, Jacob J., Born in Jerusalem, Born Palestinian: A Memoir (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2012), 36Google Scholar.

¹⁵¹ Ibid.

¹⁵² Ibid.

¹⁵³ Ibid., 37.

¹⁵⁴ Swedenburg, “Palestinian Peasant,” 22–25. See also Swedenburg, Ted, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁵⁵ Sitta, Salman Abu, Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016), 6–7Google Scholar.

¹⁵⁶ Al-Hayat, 28 January 1931, 1. Al-Hayat ran a follow-up article on this topic, exploring and condemning the economic conditions that led to this status; 1 February 1931, 1.

¹⁵⁷ The government passed an ordinance in 1933 deeming any contract for the employment of girls for over one year unenforceable. See Likhovsky, Assaf, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 85–105Google Scholar.