CC-BY-NC Noga Efrati, 2015 This essay constitutes part of The First World War and its Aftermath (978 1 909942 752) published by the Gingko Library 4 The First World War and its legacy for women in Iraq Noga Efrati The notion that the First world war was a watershed in gender relations in European societies, has characterised contemporary narratives and, for a long time, also historiography. women proved their ‘patriotism and itness for citizenship’ and were rewarded with political and other rights. 1 a similar sentiment can be noted in post-First world war Iraq, if we stretch beyond the generally-accepted 1914–1918 timeline, as some suggest, 2 and include the 1920 revolt. Iraqi women’s leaders portrayed the revolt against the British occupation as a deining moment for women not only manifesting women’s 1 Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Controversy: war-related Changes in Gender Relations: The Issue of women’s Citizenship’, in Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson (eds). International Encyclopedia of the First World War (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin: 2014), accessed 30 January 2014. doi: 10.15463/ie1418.10036; Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger, and Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Introduction: women’s and Gender history of the First world war – Topics, Concepts, Perspectives’, in Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger, and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (eds), Gender and the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, houndmills, Basingstoke, hampshire: 2014), pp 10, 14 note 23. 2 Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela suggested expanding the canvas on which the history of the Great war is written and see the ighting between 1914 and 1918 as part of a continuum of conlict that began with the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and did not end until the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, when a new order was in place not just in Europe and the Middle East but also in Asia and Africa. See Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds), Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2014).