In the aftermath of Tahrir Square, she examines the crucial role of women in Egypt's popular uprising. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. In Abu Dhabi, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who've found freedom in work outside the home. In Lebanon, she documents a country that on the surface is freer than other Arab nations but whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In Syria, before its civil war, she documents a complex society in the midst of soul searching about its place in the world and about the role of women. And, in 2011, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests in the Arab Spring. Hundreds of thousands of devout girls and women are attending Qur'anic schools-and using the training to argue for greater rights and freedoms from an Islamic perspective. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are beginning to face down religious and social tradition in order to live independently, to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. There were only children and married women. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East.

For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux.

Excellent daughters by katherine zoepf