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Hoda Shaarawi, the pioneer Egyptian women's rights activist. Had it not been for Hoda Shaarawi, many Egyptian women would have never had any education. As early as 1910 she was one of the first Egyptian women to stand up for women's rights. She also stood against British military presence in Egypt. In 1910 she opened the first public education school for girls. She and a friend of hers, Siza Nabarawi founded the first explicitly feminist organisation, Al-Ittihad Al-Nisa’i Al-Misri (the Egyptian Women's Union) as well as the first women’s magazine, "l’Égyptienne".
Upon her return to Alexandria in 1923 after having attended the International Feminist Congress in Rome as president of the Egyptian delegation, Hoda Shaarawi followed by her colleague Siza Nabarawi removed their veil and uncovered their faces. The two women thus became the first Egyptian women to publically remove their veil, denouncing it as a foreign tradition, and a symbol of male domination. This event took place at the Cairo train station, where a group of women in long black veils were waiting for them. During her visit to Rome, Hoda Shaarawi did not hesitate to ask the Italian leader Benito Mussolini when she met him at the end of the Congress, to grant Italian women the right to vote.
Her husband, who was her first cousin and thirty years her senior, had divorced her when she refused to wear the veil. But she had pressed on and in 1924 had won one of her demands for reform: establishing sixteen as the minimum age for girls to marry instead of the then common twelve or thirteen. She wanted to make higher education available to girls, she wanted to abolish polygamy and arranged marriages, abolish prostitution and female genital mutilation. Her other demands for reform were probably too early for their times, so they failed unfortunately.
Adapted and translated from French from « Le féminisme arabe » by Osire Glacier -‘Relations’, Montréal, September 2007 (719), p.30-31. |
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