[1] Its purpose was to achieve social and political gender equality while promoting Arab nationalism.
The EFU was the starting point of the organized feminist movement in the Arab World when it was founded in 1923.
In 1938, the EFU organised the Eastern Women’s Conference for the Defense of Palestine in Cairo, and Huda Sharawi suggested the individual countries establish feminist unions, and that those unions formed an umbrella organization, spanning the Arab world.
The AFU were originally mainly an offspring of the Arab Women's Association of Palestine, which had attended the Conference.
From the 1960s, several totalitarian regimes in newly independent Arab countries opposed feminist organizing.