For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt

For many Egyptians in the early twentieth century, the biggest problem facing the nation was not British domination or the Great Depression but a "marriage crisis" heralded in the press as a devastating rise in the number of middle-class men refraining from marriage. Egyptians of the time not only voiced anxieties over a presumed increase in bachelorhood but also used the failings of Egyptian marriage to offer criticisms of British rule, unemployment, the disintegration of female seclusion,...