Not sure if this is what you were looking for but here's a few interesting historical facts.
The Iranian poetess Táhirih was the first modern woman to undertake Qur'anic exegesis. Born and raised in a traditional Muslim family, she would later become a prominent member of the Bábí Faith, during which time she openly denounced polygyny, the wearing of the veil and other restraints put upon women. One of her most notable quotes is her final utterance prior to her execution, "You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women."
Egyptian jurist Qasim Amin, the author of the 1899 pioneering book Women's Liberation (Tahrir al-Mar'a), is often described as the father of the Egyptian feminist movement. In his work, Amin criticized some of the practices prevalent in his society at the time, such as polygyny, the veil, and purdah, i.e. sex segregation in Islam. He condemned them as un-Islamic and contradictory to the true spirit of Islam. His work had an enormous influence on women's political movements throughout the Islamic and Arab world, and is read and cited today.
Despite Qasim Amin's effects on modern-day Islamic feminist movements, present-day scholar Leila Ahmed considers his works both androcentric and colonialist. Muhammad 'Abdu, an Egyptian nationalist, could easily have written the chapters of his work that show honest considerations of the negative effects of the veil on women. Amin even posed many male-centered misconceptions about women, such as their inability to experience love, that women needlessly (when they had very good reason to) talk about their husbands outside their presence, and that Muslim marriage is based on ignorance and sensuality, of which women were the chief source.
Less known, however, are the women who preceded Amin in their feminist critique of their societies. The women's press in Egypt started voicing such concerns since its very first issues in 1892. Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese women and men had been reading European feminist magazines even a decade earlier, and discussed their relevance to the Middle East in the general press.
Recently Islamic feminists have begun advocating for equality in the mosque and equality in prayer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_feminism#Nineteenth_century
Topic: Student with questions