Al-Harakah Al-Nissa'Iyah: The women's movement and political participation in modern Egypt

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze the dialectic relation between gender, class, and the state during a particularly explosive period of recent Egyptian history through an in-depth examination of women's organized attempts at political participation within the larger context of Egyptian national politics. Most contemporary scholarship on the women's movement in Egypt associate its beginnings with the 1919 Revolution, assumes its demise in the late 1930s and overlooks the post World War II period in the analysis of its authenticity and relevance. Yet it is precisely during this period (1945–1959) that the women's movement comes of age in the sense that it experiences a diversification in ideology, tactics, and goals and in that it begins to transcend its elitist origins and membership. Moreover, it is in this period that the women's movement consciously shifts away from being dominated by a socially oriented, mostly philanthropic organization (The Egyptian Feminist Union) to a diversified political movement (including several organizations) that attempt to link the women's struggle to other political and social concerns such as the nationalist movement and class struggle.