Huda Shaarawi and the Feminists That Paved the Road to Reform in Egypt
By Kenzy Fahmy
Egypt has produced its fair share of strong women, from the queens who ruled thousands of years ago, to the women who defied the country’s social norms in order to fight for their freedoms and for equal rights. The late-19th century and early 1900s brought with them intense social and political change, and with that, a powerful feminist movement that was to greatly alter the lives of women in Egypt. Spearheading that movement was Huda Shaarawi, a woman whose dedication and courage earned her the title of “Egypt’s First Feminist”.
Born in 1879 to a wealthy and highly influential family, Shaarawi was educated from a young age, a privilege that at the time came only with status. She wasn’t, however, immune to the burden of marriage, and wed her eldest cousin and legal guardian at the age of thirteen, right after her father’s death.
Her husband, Ali Shaarawi, was politically active and Huda was able to play a role in his work, putting her fierce intelligence and determination to use. At a time when women were still confined to the harem, totally isolated from the public and from the opposite sex, Huda was advocating for women’s rights to education and quickly became aware of the limitations the harem system placed on women. While schools for girls were not unheard of – Khedive Ismail’s wife had opened one in 1873 – education was still heavily restricted for women and was limited to wealthy families. Huda began to organize lectures that women could attend, outside their homes and outside the bounds of the harem, and in 1910, opened a school for girls where they could be taught academic subjects rather than skills like homemaking and midwifery.
A few years later, as WWI was coming to an end, Egypt was gearing up to fight for independence from British rule, a fight that both Huda and her husband were to play a central role in. The Wafd party was born, founded by Saad Zaghloul and with Ali Shaarawi acting as one of the party’s leading members.
In 1919, Huda organized a women-led protest that included not only women from Egypt’s elite but also women from the working class and countryside. They were protesting the British occupation and demanding the release of imprisoned nationalist leaders. Many of those same women joined the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee, founded a year later, and elected Huda Shaarawi as their president, to lead them alongside Safia Zaghloul, Saad Zaghloul’s wife and another of Egypt’s great feminists. Safia Zaghloul worked very closely with her husband and became a central figure in the Wafd party after her husband was exiled.
The nationalists finally gained independence in 1922, but the women quickly realized that their efforts and support didn’t bring them any closer to freedom. Despite standing by and fighting alongside their male counterparts, the women were still viewed as incapable of leading a life as equal to men and their needs were seen as secondary to the needs of the country. But 1922 was to be a major turning point in Huda’s life. Her husband died that year, and although they had already spent a large portion of their marriage separated, affording Shaarawi the space to pursue both her education and social goals, his death meant a newfound freedom to devote herself fully to the feminist movement.
It was this same year, clearly a defining one for Shaarawi, that she decided to take off her veil at the train station; an iconic moment in Egyptian history and a gesture that turned Shaarawi into a legend. Shaarawi had just returned from Rome where she and a few other delegates had attended a meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, a meeting where they had decided to remove their face veils in order to create a better dialogue with the European delegates.
While stepping down off the train, Huda Shaarawi lifted the veil from her face, and with that simple but defiant gesture, the feminist movement in Egypt was born. Those who had come to greet her applauded her bravery, and after an initial moment of shock, many of the women there that day also removed their veils. In the decades following this one statement, women in Egypt remained unveiled, a change that came not by decree, but through a grassroots movement led by a group of well educated women who believed it was time for women’s lives in Egypt to improve.
In 1923, Shaarawi made the movement official and founded the Egyptian Feminist Union. Their goal was to create massive reforms in the Egyptian constitution and family law that would allow women to live safe lives with access to the same rights as men. Huda believed that the fate of the country and the fate of its women were one and the same, and the only way to move forward was to allow women to become equal citizens. They were extremely ambitious in their goals, wanting to reform education and healthcare laws, personal status laws and voting laws. They wanted to end polygamy and change divorce laws. And while they weren’t able to change everything, they were able to make primary education compulsory for girls as well as boys, and to have women attending university before the end of the 1920s, two major achievements.
Musa, Shaarawi and Nabrawi, Cairo Railway Station 1923 Image Credit
The early-1900s saw a number of women stand up against existing oppressive norms, each speaking her mind and fighting, in her own way, for the freedom to live and to participate. Malak Hifni Nasif, a prolific writer and intellectual, published a number of works that explored the status of women in Egypt, but didn’t share the view that women should remove their veils as a sign of liberation. Nasif believed in bridging the divide between tradition and modernity. Nabawiyya Musa, another great writer and thinker, believed that granting women more rights was the only way for Egypt to move forward, and that by allowing women to become productive and valued members of society, they could become a major asset to the country’s growth and productivity. Musa was among the delegates who attended the Rome conference in 1923 and stood unveiled next to Shaarawi on that train platform. As was Saiza Nabrawi, another highly educated journalist who helped found the Egyptian Feminist Union along with Shaarawi, and acted as editor of the Union’s popular publication, “L’Egyptienne”.
The Egyptian Feminist Union would live for another thirty-three years, to be dismantled finally by Abdel Nasser in 1956 and absorbed into government regulation, but not before gaining one more victory. In 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser granted women the right to vote, a victory won as a result of the fierce fight led by Dorria Shafik.
Shafik with President Mohamed Naguib in 1952 Image Credit
Shafik, a brilliant, highly educated woman, was a poet, editor and founder of Bint Al Nil (Daughter of the Nile) magazine. She published countless articles on women’s rights and social issues, and in 1848, created the Bint Al Nil Union, wanting to fix many of the country’s policies, lower illiteracy rates and ensure the inclusion of women in the public and political sphere. She led a thousand-woman march on parliament in 1951, led a paramilitary unit to shut down a branch of Barclays Bank, formed her own political party in 1952, and went on a hunger strike in 1957 in protest of Nasser. Shafik was relentless in her fight for women’s rights and set the stage for the next generation of feminists. Writers like Nawal el Saadawi gladly took the reins and carried forward the legacy of that fight, standing firm in their belief that equality for women is not a threat to society, but a blessing. She bravely pushed the lines that had been drawn for her in order to shed light on issues that society refused to face.
It is now just over a hundred years since the birth of the Egyptian feminist movement, and a new generation of women has joined the fight, this time with social media as their weapon of choice. Women are once again uniting to fight for a safer Egypt, for policies that protect them and for social change that will improve not just their lives, but the lives of all Egyptians. Just over a hundred years later and Shaarawi’s words on the inseparability of the lives of women and the success of the state ring as true as ever, and the legacy she leaves behind, along with the women who fought beside her and after her, is not one that will diminish or be forgotten. Each new wave of feminists will face different challenges, but at the heart of the fight is a belief that will never change; equality serves all, not just a few.