Margot Badran is Professor of Women's Studies and History at Oberlin College. A specialist in the Middle East,
she translated, edited, and introduced Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, Huda Shaarawi and
is coeditor of Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing.
Review
"Most accounts of modern Egyptian history focus on and are written by men. This one is differentand welcome.
It traces the development of Egyptian nationalist sentiment by concentrating on the emergence of Egyptian feminism,
[from] the rise of 'feminist consciousness' [to] the creation of explicitly political feminist organizations."
--Foreign Affairs
"Badran ... challenge[s] the notion that feminism is only a Western creation and that it is incompatible
with Islam.... This new study will be respected for its high level of scholarship and its sophisticated analysis."
--Choice
Submitted by Publisher, April, 2002.
Summary
The emergence and evolution of Egyptian feminism is an integral, but previously untold, part of the history
of modern Egypt. Drawing upon a wide range of women's sourcesmemoirs, letters, essays, journalistic articles, fiction,
treatises, and extensive oral historiesMargot Badran shows how Egyptian women assumed agency and in so doing subverted
and refigured the conventional patriarchal order. Unsettling a common claim that "feminism is Western"
and dismantling the alleged opposition between feminism and Islam, the book demonstrates how the Egyptian feminist
movement in the first half of this century both advanced the nationalist cause and worked within the parameters
of Islam.
Table of Contents
Preface
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Abbreviations
Introduction
Pt. 1 Rising Feminist Consciousness
Ch. 1 Two Lives in Changing Worlds
Ch. 2 Claiming Public Space
Ch. 3 Thinking Gender
Ch. 4 Egypt for Which Egyptians?
Pt. 2 The Feminist Movement
Ch. 5 The House of the Woman
Ch. 6 City Sisters, Country Sisters
Ch. 7 Recasting the Family
Ch. 8 Educating the Nation
Ch. 9 Women Have Always Worked
Ch. 10 Traffic in Women
Ch. 11 Suffrage and Citizenship
