Since the 1980s many books and journal papers have been published about the lives and career of women educational leaders mainly in modern, developed societies, while our knowledge of the experiences of these women in traditional societies remains relatively scant. In this sense, Arar et al.'s book is a welcome contribution to our research on women and educational leadership worldwide.
The book explores the life stories and careers of 22 pioneer Arab women leaders in education who have struggled to attain leadership positions in a patriarchal society in which management is socially seen as a masculine position solely. It is unsurprising, then, that the book focuses considerably on the resistance that Arab women meet when they aspire to construct a professional career both as women in the Arab society and as members of a minority group in Israel.
Following an unexpected, yet revealing, elucidation of each of the authors’ personal biography and perspectives, including their personal and academic motivations to study Arab women leaders (two of the authors are Muslims and two are Jewish), the book contains six chapters that combine both theoretical background and the women's voices. The first chapter displays briefly and creatively each of the women leaders who participated in the authors’ study in terms of age, religion, observance, education, marital status, and time in post. I liked the authors’ decision to display each woman by adding one quote from her interview transcript that illustrates, to a larger extent, her life and career cycle. This enabled me to become “closer” to the interviewees and to be attached more emotionally with their world.
The second chapter discusses the theoretical and empirical literatures in which the book is grounded. It commences by defining women's leadership in the western world and by illuminating common trends in the research on women leaders (e.g. barriers to women's advancement in education). It goes on to analyze the historical development of women's movements and feminism in the Arab world, emphasizing the complex lives of Arab women due to a number of moral codes and entrenched gender norms in their male-dominated society. They are excluded in many Arab countries from the public sphere, i.e., from public debates and leadership positions. The authors did not stop here but wisely reviewed the few studies that traced the factors affecting Arab women's professional success, such as education, family support, and personal traits such as energy and self-confidence.
Each of the next four chapters begins with a short review of the western-originated literature and continues to describe the voices of the Arab female leaders in a way that very fascinatingly combines theoretical sensitivity and empirical data. Thus, the third chapter begins with a review of extant research concerning women school principals and emphasizes the differences in leadership styles between man and women mostly in Anglo-American societies and, to a lesser extent, in the Arab society in Israel where the interviewees live and work. The focus of this chapter, nevertheless, is on the ways by which the Arab women principals have attained their posts in spite of many difficulties they had to face on the way up. One of the cultural barriers to women's advancement in the Arab society is described by Iman, one of the female interviewees, who said empathically that in the tender “they didn’t consider me, and no one even took me into account […] because I’m a woman” (p. 47). But, determined to get equal opportunities, she appealed and won, yet felt unwanted by teachers and stakeholders. Others told similar stories. Their access into the public sphere had not a Midas touch, to say the least.
However, they did it and became school principals. Thus, the fourth chapter discusses the new phenomenon of Arab women in high school principalship. The main, and in my view, most commendable question the authors pose in this chapter is how these women overcame the many cultural and organizational barriers and fulfilled their aspiration to lead. The answer is brought up by the narratives of three Arab women high school principals who demonstrate the importance of empowerment within the family, an arrival at the right time, and the challenging of cultural norms through varied coping strategies. I was very thrilled to read the women's voices describing the ways by which they coped with many forms of resistance to their advancement (e.g. resistance of male teachers who could not accept a woman's authority as principal). Their fascinating stories provide example to the female career in traditional societies.
Chapter Five is dedicated to the challenges and difficulties Arab women supervisors are faced with due to the dominance of men in this role. It begins with a review of the literature about the transition of women from teaching to supervision in western countries and goes on to display the Arab women's voices in relation to this transition. Interestingly, the supervisors stressed the fact that their families empowered them from an early age and that their career advancement depended considerably on male figures in their nuclear family. Additionally, they indicated that it was possible to reach the summit with determination and perseverance. Unsurprising, then, they struggle to lead the Arab education system toward a more challenging pedagogy in an attempt to influence social order and empower student abilities.
The final chapter deals with Muslim women principals’ adoption of traditional dress and head coverings, the meaning of this phenomenon, and its contribution to women principals in their different life spheres. The authors found that although the decision to alter their dress seemed to be a very personal decision, the Arab women's change was driven by sociocultural messages that played a decisive part in the women's decisions to wear traditional cloth. The women's voices demonstrate the process they have undergone from non-religious to religious identity and I especially enjoyed reading the critical events that pushed them to commence the identity change in parallel to their management position.
Although some of the insights we gain from this book have already appeared in past research on Muslim women, the authors were very successful in transmitting the particular world of Arab women educational leadership whose stories had rarely been told. The authors connect, very creatively, between theory and women's voices and locate a very impressive sentence told by the interviewees as a title or sub-title. This made me feel more associated emotionally with the lives and career of these women and encouraged me to read their story thoroughly.
No text is perfect, however. At some points I felt that the organization of the book, i.e., the story-line presented in the book is not clear enough. I could not fully understand the rationale underlying the organization of the chapters. Furthermore, the mix of theory and voices from the field in each chapter were slightly bewildering as I was not sure if a certain point illuminated in the book is drawn from the literature or from the women's own narrative. This, nevertheless, did not decrease the joy I felt when reading this book.
