This special issue tries to help to understand the 'woman question' in modern Middle East history and demonstrates the complexity of the struggles women faced as they organized locally, regionally, and internationally for reforms to improve women's status in society. Camron Amin, Kathryn Libal, and Orit Bashkin focus on the movement for women's rights in Iran, Turkey, and Iraq, respectively, while Charlotte Weber considers the aims of women organizing across national boundaries in the context of the Eastern Women's Congresses at Damascus in 1930 and Tehran in 1932. Ellen Dubois and Haleh Emrani present a speech by the primary organizer of these two conferences, available in English translation for the first time. The term 'woman question' compresses into two words a complex social, cultural, and political phenomenon that had at its center the issue of women's place in society. The woman question was central to debates over the form the nation-state should take after liberation from foreign occupation and the achievement of national independence.