SOURCE: Tucker, Judith E. “The Voice behind the Veil.” Women's Review of Books 6, no. 8 (May 1989): 16-17.

In the following excerpt, Tucker evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Doing Daily Battle.

Both of these books [Doing Daily Battle and Women of Marrakech, by Leonora Peets] belong to a new and expanding genre in Middle East women's studies in which women writers seek to capture women's daily lives by giving their interviewees a voice in the telling of their stories. This is insurrectionary literature that contests the “pervasive male discourse,” as Fatima Mernissi terms it, of Moroccan society. In exploring their ideas about love and marriage, work and leisure, the seen and the unseen, both authors make the women of their books come alive, so that we may recognize them as people whose oppression and lack of power neither blur their personalities nor still their tongues. …

Fatima Mernissi brings a...