Long before gaining independence, Sudan has seenexperienced remarkable female activism in the public sphere. Sudanese women have also played a substantial part in the struggle for independence, as members of political parties and organizations. They achieved suffrage and labor rights a few years after independence and even joined Parliament as the first African and Arab womanwomen. Yet, they have always found themselves confined to male-dominated parties, in a patriarchal society andwith oppressive regimes. Similar to other countries of the region, the “women’s behavior and appear-anceappearance, as well as the acceptable range of activities, have come to be defined by, and are therefore subject to, the political or cultural objectives of political movements, states, and leaderships.” To what extend have these women thus served biggerlarger revolutions while struggling for their own? This research discusses in whatthe ways in which their struggle was appropriated and instrumentalized throughout the forced process of Islamization that began around independence, manifested with the Islamist coup of 1989 and stabilized in the early 1990s. As Sudanese women have not only been subjects, but also actors within the public socio-political field, this paper then assesses how they have reacted to the state’s gender policies. Not presuming that Sudanese women hold a com-moncommon perception of gender justice, it examines how three of the most influential women’s organiza-tionsorganizations have been participatingparticipated in the discourse of gender politics, fighting, and advocating for their rights, from within a male dominatedmale-dominated public space and awithin the framework of Islaman Islamic state. It highlights their different approaches to their shared goal of women’s liberation, by way of illustration and revision of second-hand data and literature of Sudanese and non-Sudanese researchers and observers.