The lives of many Iraqi women have become appreciably harsher following international sanctions and the US-led invasion. Although pleased to see Saddam toppled, some look back on the prosperity and social liberation of the Ba'athist years with nostalgia, says Nadje Sadig Al-Ali. Iraqi women sometimes remember that they have lived in a multi-ethnic, multicultural national entity with a prospering economy and rapid modernisation; at other times they recall repression, discrimination, declining living conditions and sectarian tensions.

I have tried to document the diversity of experiences during the monarchy, the years after the revolution of 1958, the economic boom (and the expansion of the middle class) in the 1970s, the Iran-Iraq war from 1980-88, the first Gulf war of 1991 and the economic sanctions of 1990-2003.

Since the United States invasion many under-represented sections of society fail to acknowledge these experiences as different. I feel uneasy when people say "Iraqi women think