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Revolutionary Womanhood
FEMINISMS, MODERNITY, AND THE STATE IN NASSER'S EGYPT
By Laura Bier
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7439-0
Chapter One
EGYPTIAN WOMEN IN QUESTION The Historical Roots of State Feminism
"To whom does this free will, which the Egyptian people managed to extricate from the heart of the terrible battle, really belong?"
WHEN IT WAS PUBLISHED IN 1960, Latifa al-Zayyat's novel The Open Door was heralded as both a path-breaking work in Arab literature and a bold manifesto of women's liberation. The story's protagonist is Layla, a young girl from an upper middle-class Cairene family coming of age during a particularly turbulent and formative period of Egyptian history. The critical personal events of Layla's life take place against the backdrop of a decade that witnessed an unprecedented uprising of mass popular opposition to the Egyptian monarchy, British control, and the liberal-nationalist political system; the Free Officers revolution of 1952; Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal; and the Israeli-British-French attack that followed it.
When the novel opens, in the mid-1940s, Layla is a schoolgirl. Her understanding of what it means to be a woman comes with the onset of menstruation and her father's traumatized realization that Layla has grown up. She discovers that she is now subject to an elaborate set of rules, which affect almost every aspect of her life: what she may or may not say, where she is allowed to go and with whom, posture, dress, polite behavior, and whom she is (and is not) allowed to love. Her experience of entering womanhood is tantamount to "enter[ing] a prison where the confines of one's life were clearly and decisively fixed. At its door stood her father, her brother and her mother." Layla's attempts to rebel against the constraints of bourgeois society are frequently thwarted by an older generation whose corruption is figured not only by their narrow, individualistic social concerns and their treatment of their daughters as commodities to be auctioned off in "the marriage market," but also by their lack of political commitment.
But it is not only the authority wielded first by her parents that circumscribes Layla's attempts to transcend her narrow, particularistic world. Layla, like other young women of her generation, is trapped by the conflict between desire and expectation, between the constraints of a society that is already coming to be outmoded and a future full of promise, but not yet realized:
Our mothers knew their situation, whereas we are lost. We do not know if we are in a harem or not, or whether love is forbidden or allowed. Our parents say it's forbidden, yet the government-run radio sings day and night about love. Books tell women they are free, and yet if a woman really believes that, a catastrophe will happen and her reputation will be blackened.
It is through political activism and her commitment to the higher cause of Egyptian nationalism that Layla ultimately finds the courage to break free of the stifling social conventions of her bourgeois family. Abandoning the life laid out for her by social and familial expectations, she goes to Port Said after Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal to participate in the resistance movement against the invading British, French, and Israeli forces. Her choice to stand in defense of her nation also allows her to realize her love for Husayn, a fellow political activist and comrade-in-arms. It is Husayn who urges her: "Let go, my love, run forward, connect your self to others, to the millions of others, to that good land, our land, to the good people, ours.... It is a love that makes one grow: love of the nation, love for its people. So let go, my love, run forward, fling the door open wide, and leave it open." The novel's resolution and its chronicle of Layla's transformation from a passive victim to a strong and independent woman is a poignant and passionate statement of the intimate and inseparable relation between personal liberation and the political freedom of self-determination, as well as an allegory of the historical progress of the nation itself.
Al-Zayyat's novel is the product of a historical moment when many doors appeared to be opening for Egyptian women. Two years after The Open Door was published, a committee made up of representatives from Egypt's "progressive forces" issued the "Charter for National Action" (Al-Mithaq al-Watani), a document that laid out the blueprints for Egypt's development from a backward, impoverished society still suffering from the crippling legacies of colonial rule to a strong, modern, independent nation-state capable of providing equality and social justice to its citizens. "The Egyptian woman" was, along with workers and peasants, explicitly addressed by the charter as both a beneficiary of the Nasserist state- and nation-building project, and an agent of social and political transformation. The section of the charter devoted to the creation of an Arab Socialist society stated, "Woman must be regarded as equal to men and must therefore shed the remaining shackles that impede her free movement so that she might take a constructive and profound part in shaping life."
With the publication of the charter and the adoption of Arab Socialism as the official regime ideology, state discourses declared "the woman question" as such definitively answered by the realization of national liberation. In 1956, the new constitution had made women fully enfranchised citizens, granting them the right to vote and to run for public office. Later measures were enacted to guarantee women's access to education and mobilization into the workforce. All citizens, regardless of gender, were granted the right to vote and the right to public education and were charged with the duty of public labor on the nation's behalf. It was through their inclusion in the Egyptian nation as citizens that groups formerly excluded from the body politic, women among them, were to be liberated from past oppression.
The woman question, however, was not a blank slate on which the regime could draw its own normative vision of gender relations in the new revolutionary society. In many respects the terms in which gender issues were conceptualized and confronted had already been set in the earlier period. Visions of the "new" revolutionary woman were the product of more than half a century's worth of debates about gender, feminism, and modernity that produced a secular narrative of progress institutionalized in the postcolonial nation-state.
The purpose of this chapter is to look for the roots of "state feminism"—the Nasser regime's answer to the woman question—in the discourses, debates, state-building processes, and social changes of the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that ultimately the state which emerged as a result of the 1952 revolution embodied both the promises and the limitations of the preceding half century of modernizing discourses on feminism, the nation, and inclusion. The first sections connect the emergence of anticolonial, nationalist visions of womanhood both with British colonial discourses on Egyptian women and with local debates about political authority, modernity, and the domestic practices of Egyptians, which converged after Egypt was granted quasi-independence in 1923 to produce the reformed bourgeois family as a model for the modern secular national state. Egyptian women, as "mothers of the nation," were imagined both as a potent symbol for the modernity of the independent nation and as boundary markers of national culture and group identity, while actual Egyptian women were excluded from formal political participation.
The chapter goes on to examine how the political crises and social displacements of the 1930s and 1940s intersected to challenge the gender regime of liberal-nationalist rule, producing novel articulations of feminism and modernity as well as transformations in the discursive, epistemological, and material structures of the state as a modern regime of power. These interwar transformations helped pave the way for the rise of mass political movements after the Second World War, movements that mobilized increasing numbers of politically disenfranchised Egyptians to challenge the elite paternalism of liberal-national rule even as they reproduced some of its gendered tenets. Women who were active in these movements asserted their own visions of political solidarity and liberation, which differed both from previous gendered models of citizenship and from those posited by their male compatriots.
THE GENEALOGIES OF THE WOMAN QUESTION
At the end of the nineteenth century, Egyptian reformers such as Qasim Amin, whose 1899 book The Liberation of Women touched off a firestorm of controversy, began to call for a transformation in the status of women in Egyptian society at a time when many Egyptians, chafing under a seventeen-year British occupation, had begun to pose fundamental questions about the nature of Egyptian society, politics, and the conditions of possibility for an independent, postcolonial future. In The Liberation of Women and his follow-up book, The New Woman, Amin advocated a number of changes necessary to advance the position of Egyptian women, including abolishing the hijab, ending practices of gender segregation, establishing schools for girls, and reforming divorce laws to curb practices like polygamy.
Amin's call to reform Egyptian womanhood as a means to the betterment and uplift of Egyptian society reflected a much longer-standing preoccupation by Egyptian elites with questions of modernity. In the context of a changing world order in which political, social, and economic structures were being transformed by the spread of global capitalism and European colonial expansion, what were the sources of Egypt's seeming failure to advance along the trajectory of historical development? How could Egypt's "backward" populace be transformed into productive subjects? Such questions were posed as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century but gained new urgency and political valence with the assumption of British colonial control in 1882.
Emerging in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of discourses on domesticity, culture, and modernization, Egyptian womanhood became the terrain on which British colonial officials and an emerging nationalist bourgeoisie contested Egyptian moral and political authority for self-rule. Colonial critiques of native practices centered on the figure of "the Muslim woman," whose ignorance and oppressed condition was asserted simultaneously as cause and result of the deplorable domestic practices to be found in Egyptian homes and families. Polygamy, early and arranged marriages, gender segregation embodied in the institution of the harem, and the practice of veiling—the latter singled out as the most visible marker of the difference and inferiority of Islamic societies—became symbols of the oppression of women and the backwardness of Egyptian society.
Yet the promise of "civilization" that was used to justify colonial authority ultimately served the construction of a nationalist, anticolonial politic of reform. Colonial assertions of the ignorant condition of Egyptian women and the degraded state of the Egyptian family intersected with the aspirations of nationalist reformers and intellectuals to produce a didactic discourse on scientific childrearing and domestic hygiene that targeted women (and Egyptian mothers particularly) both as ignorant and backward and as a locus of reform and cultural uplift. The establishment of girls' schools, whose curricula centered largely on tadbir al-manzil (household management); the training and certification of nurse-midwives; and the proliferation of pedagogical articles in a burgeoning women's press, discussing how to maintain the requisite standards of hygiene to ensure a happy home and a healthy family, were all measures aimed at "remaking women" as a means of modernizing Egyptian society.
This process by which the status of women, the domestic practices of colonized Egyptians, and the modernity and political legitimacy of the Egyptian nation were linked was neither univocal nor uncontested; the connections forged between family and nation, and in particular between liberal-nationalism and bourgeois domesticity, were the product of numerous discursive and material struggles between reformers, nationalist activists, ruling elites, and colonial officials. Certainly, Amin's strident condemnation of veiling led to vocal opposition, often couched in the language of preserving Islamic cultural authenticity in the face of Western encroachment. At the same time, calls for reforming local domestic practices (and women with them) were not solely the purview of secular, Westernized reformers but were also a preoccupation of reformers working within the Islamic modernist tradition.
Neither solely a product of imposed colonial modernization, nor the unproblematic adoption of Western gender norms and ideals by Westernized reformers (or their rejection by religious traditionalists), the woman question made gender central to attempts to define the parameters of a new national identity that was both "modern" and authentically Egyptian. These debates were not solely (or even primarily) about women's political agency or their status as rights-bearing citizens. They were about claims to political authority asserted by various groups within the emerging nation-state. Normative claims about Egyptian families and the women in them were simultaneously: a means by which colonized men affirmed their fitness for self-rule against a colonial power, a rising native bourgeoisie asserted their authority to lead against both traditional elites and subaltern men, and a means to envision the shape of a future independent nation. Over the next several decades, as competing and inchoate notions of women, family, and nation continued to crystallize, the vision of Amin and reformers like him would become foundational to the emergence and consolidation of what scholars elsewhere have referred to as effendiyya nationalism and the secular nation-state forms that underpinned it.
As the calls for female education and national reform spread during the first two decades of the twentieth century, women took an increasingly public role in the project of national renaissance. Women's journals, which flourished during this period, elaborated a concept of "maternal citizenship," which glorified women's roles, on the one hand as mothers and custodians of a reformed domestic sphere based upon bourgeois models of companionate marriage, scientific childrearing, and rational household management, and on the other as national subjects with a duty to participate outside the home in the everyday struggle against colonial domination and local "backwardness." Indeed the two roles were seen as being part and parcel of one another. Women of elite backgrounds and middle-class women, who had been early beneficiaries of the calls to educational reform, founded charitable organizations in which they contributed to the vocal public debates around women's status by writing for and founding magazines, attending salons, and giving talks. They were joined by middle-class women who worked as teachers in girls' schools. These activities, and the female networks and engagements that they enabled, established a base for the organized women's movement that emerged after the 1919 revolution.
THE GENDER REGIME OF LIBERAL-NATIONALIST RULE
Anticolonial political and social unrest, which had been brewing for the previous decade, culminated in a mass uprising of Egyptians against British colonial control led by the Wafd (Delegation) Party under the leadership of Egyptian lawyer Sa'd Zaghlul. The 1919 revolution witnessed mass strikes, demonstrations, violence, and economic boycott throughout Egypt in which forty British and hundreds of Egyptians were killed. Women's activism in the 1919 revolution was public and militant and transcended class barriers. Lower-class women, some of whom became national martyrs when they were shot and killed by police, participated in street protests with men. Elite women, including Huda Sha'rawi, whose husband, Ali, was one of the leaders of the Wafd, organized demonstrations and formed the Wafdist Women's Central Committee, signaling their intention to take an explicitly political role in anticolonial activism.
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Excerpted from Revolutionary Womanhood by Laura Bier Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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