Starting from the observation that research on the Maghreb still figures poorly in the relatively well-established field of women’s and gender history in Middle East Studies as it crystallizes in major collective publications and reference works, this special issue suggests to look more closely at questions of sources, methods, and dominant historiographical paradigms. More precisely, covering different thematic fields and periods of North African history, the articles critically inquire into how gender works through archive formation and usages of the archive. In doing so, they do not take the archive as a transparent source of information, but conceive of it as a set of gendered and gendering devices that need to be critically investigated in their own right. The contributions address in different ways how the making of archives – formally institutionalized as well as informal, private as well as public, written as well as oral ones – is structured by gender and how, in turn, archives contribute to producing gendered historiographies.