1879 - 1947
Egyptian feminist.
A native of Minya, Huda al-Shaʿrawi was born to a prominent and prosperous politician-landowner and a Circassian mother. She was raised in an elite household, where domestic life was still centered on the cloistered harim (harem), although transitionally so during the late nineteenth century. She describes this experience in her memoirs, dictated to her secretary during the 1940s but published only in 1981; this section of the memoir has appeared in English as Harem Years. Shaʿrawi grew up studying with tutors at home, as was typical for elite girls of the time, and was taught in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and French. Her marriage to her much older cousin and guardian, Ali Shaʿrawi, also a prominent politician, was arranged by the family and took place when she was thirteen. Some seven years later she managed to obtain a separation. Her interest in women's issues developed gradually out of her experiences and her awareness of women's activism in Europe. She was one of the founders of the 1914 Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women. As a wealthy patron as well as an organizer, she was active in charity organizing, a province open to upper-class women. But Shaʿrawi was unusual in moving from behind-the-scenes work into a highly visible, public political role. She spearheaded the Wafdist Women's Central Committee (1919) and was a leader of the famous first women's nationalist demonstration in March 1919. However, disagreement over women's appropriate political roles and particularly over whether women's demands should be admitted to discussions leading to the Egyptian constitution caused a rift with the Wafd, Egypt's nationalist party. Shaʿrawi went on to found, with a group of women, al-Ittihad al-nisa'i al-Misri (Egyptian Feminist Union; EFU) in 1923. She presided over it until her death. The EFU founded two journals, the French-language L'Egyptienne (1925), for which Shaʿrawi wrote editorials, and al-Misriyya in Arabic over a decade later (1937), when a broader audience fueled the need for a journal in the indigenous language. Shaʿrawi's writing appeared here, too, though she probably played less of a role in the journal. Shaʿrawi and two colleagues attended the 1923 International Women Suffrage Alliance in Rome and was responsible for a famous symbolic moment when, on her return, she publicly lifted her veil at Cairo's main railway station. She gradually became more involved in regional and international feminist organizing, becoming vice president of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in 1935 and leading a move to found the Arab Feminist Union in 1945.
Bibliography
Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and theMaking of Modern Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Shaarawi, Huda. Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879 - 1924), translated, edited, and introduced by Margot Badran. London: Virago, 1986; New York: Feminist Press, City University of New York, 1987.
— DAVID WALDNER
UPDATED BY MARILYN BOOTH
