Huda Shaarawi Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Huda Shaarawi was a prominent Egyptian women’s rights activist and arguably the most important Arab feminist of the 20th century. She began her career of political activism by organizing lectures for mostly upper-class women of the harem and later became a member of the Wafd Party women’s committee, which gained recognition because of substantive all-women’s demonstrations in the 1919 revolt. Shaarawi was from an upper-class background, with extensive political connections—her husband was one of the founders of the Wafd Party in 1919, and she was the daughter of the president of Egypt’s first national assembly.

However, Shaarawi fought the upper-class institution of the harem by removing her veil in 1923 when she disembarked from a train station in Cairo, marking the beginning of the end of the harem in Egypt. In 1923 she also formed Egypt’s first women’s organization, the Egyptian Feminist Union, whose agenda focused on women’s political rights, including the right to vote and the right to stand for parliamentary elections. In her activism Shaarawi reflected two ongoing social and political movements, Islamic modernism and secular nationalism, challenging both British colonial rule over Egypt and Egyptian patriarchy by claiming that they concurrently served to eclipse women’s voices. She was the founder and president of the Arab Feminist Union and vice president of the International Women’s Union. She was a strong advocate for girls’ education and participated in more than 14 international women’s gatherings on behalf of Egyptian women.

Bibliography:

Shaarawi, Huda. Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924). Margot Badran, trans., ed., and intro. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1987;
Talhami, Ghada Hashem. The Mobilization of Muslim Women in Egypt. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

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