This dissertation explores the ways in which Americans constructed a public understanding about gender relations in Muslim countries from the Iranian Revolution through the post-9/11 period that cast Muslims as oppressors of women. It argues that such understandings significantly influenced U.S. foreign policy in recent decades. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the degree to which women had or lacked rights became one barometer by which Americans judged Muslim societies. Journalists, scholars, women's rights activists, novelists, filmmakers, politicians, and others in the U.S. contributed to public debates since 1979 that cast Muslims as particularly oppressive of women. The pervasiveness of such views and lobbying efforts by women's rights activists pushed policymakers to situate the attainment of rights for women within the constellation of legitimate areas of policy concern regarding the Muslim world. As a consequence, by the 1990s concern for Muslim women's rights sometimes drove U.S. policy, as when President Clinton chose not to recognize the Taliban regime in 1998; at other times, rhetoric about the oppression of Muslim women became a political tool which policymakers could use to provide legitimacy and moral force for their interventions in the Islamic world. This story is both national and transnational and involves both state and non-state actors. / History