Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, Politics, Beth Baron, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005. pp287 The only existing statue of a twentieth-century Egyptian woman, among a multitude of male writers, engineers, political activists and British colonialists, all of whom have their memorials, is apparently that of the singer Umm Kulthoum (1904-1975) in Cairo. With a round-about -- where her villa once stood in Zamalek -- named after her, and a statue beneath some trees outside the Cairo Opera House, Umm Kalthoum's presence extends beyond musical confines. Indeed, like her male peers such as Saad Zaghloul, Mustafa Kamil and Talaat Harb, Umm Kulthoum gave human form to Egypt's nationalist struggle in the last century and to women's role within it. Other women activists, such as Huda Sharawi and Doria Shafik, and prominent actresses such as Aziza Amir and Fatima (Ruz) al-Yusuf, also made their mark in the public domain. They, however, await memorialisation. As Beth Baron notes in her book Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, Politics, the "adoration for actresses such as Fatima (Ruz) al-Yusuf and singers such as Munira Mahdiyya and Umm Kulthoum unified Egyptians around stars and enhanced national identity" over many decades in the last century, and "the illustrated press was the first in a series of modern cultural products -- records, radios, and film -- to produce national icons." Indeed, in the 1940s and 50s Umm Kulthoum took on the role of "Voice of the Nation", perhaps a reference to the role played earlier by Safiyya Zaghloul, wife of the nationalist Saad Zaghloul, as the mistress of the "House of the Nation", the popular name for Saad Zaghloul's house (both women, incidentally, were childless). And Baron's interest is in how this image of Egypt as a woman has been sustained, altered, or transformed, exploring development of such iconic female presences in Egyptian national consciousness. The very prominence of these earlier national icons also inspires one to ask who their equivalents in modern Egyptian and Arab politics might be. In the Egypt of the last century women possessed various channels through which they could express themselves and voice forms of resistance, many of which are analogous to similar channels today. Women have always employed the materials to hand, among them different forms of media, and they have long sought to control their appearance in the public sphere: even today, how women dress can serve as an indicator of boundaries being crossed, or as the expression of political views, as the different kinds of veil currently worn make clear. From images of the Ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti, to those of the Egyptian peasant woman, the unveiled "new woman," and the newly veiled woman advertising her conservative or religious sensibilities, the images women have adopted for themselves, and those that they have been given by others, have long reflected national and political, as well as personal, concerns. At the turn of the twentieth-century, new forms of appearance were adopted by the female members of the country's elites, these women seeking in so doing to register their support for the nationalist struggle. For these women, the main subject of Baron's book, going public had to be done in accordance with their status as "respectable women," and indeed it often reinforced this and rarely went beyond limits laid down by male counterparts. To an extent, it appears that it was not so important what these women were doing in the public sphere as the nature of their appearance in it. The use of Pharaonic imagery is a case in point, and it is one with which Baron begins her analysis. Examining Mahmoud Mukhtar's famous sculpture, "Egypt's Awakening", for example, which depicts a peasant woman lifting her veil with one hand as she rests the other on a sphinx, Baron writes that in "juxtaposing Egypt's ancient pharaonic glory with her modern awakening, Mukhtar... depicts modern Egypt as a woman." This tradition of depicting "political abstractions," such as the nation, in female forms dates back to antiquity, and Mukhtar's sculpture is one well- known example of it. However, as Baron points out such representation remained for the most part highly abstract, resting less on real women than on mythological ones. Thus, while Safiyya Zaghloul retained her political role after her husband's death, other women activists of the time, such as Huda Sharawi, were not so lucky. Realising that the nationalist movement led by the Wafd Party was the only way towards ensuring British expulsion from Egypt, Sharawi threw herself into nationalist politics only to discover that these left women more or less where they had started, the nationalists not being keen to open up male political monopoly to female competition. Once the nationalist struggle had achieved its immediate aims, women's concerns and grievances were left untouched and still lying on the table -- and this, it might be added, is where some of them at least remain today. Women in this movement, Baron writes, "relied on maternal authority and appealed to morality precisely because they had few options for making themselves heard. In spite of two decades of attempting to break into the political system, they had not yet obtained the right to vote, to run for parliament, or to hold office." In this situation, writing was one of the few weapons available to them, and the book reveals the way in which women employed the media to advance their cause. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including memoirs, journals, newspapers, letters, and telegrams, and women's employment of petitions and demonstration, (often organised by telephone) Baron shows how women's associations were formed and how women participated in the formation of a women's press dealing with women's issues. It is a pity, however, that Baron has not included an appendix to her book listing major publications of this press. Baron's previous studies of the images produced of women at this time and the contributions that they made to the country's press, for example in her book The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society and the Press, are also very relevant in this context and again perhaps trigger consideration of the channels available to women today. There is still a multitude of issues to be addressed. "After the 'ladies' demonstrations' of March 1919, elite women continued to protest, picketing ministries during strikes in April, joining street celebrations, publishing articles and poems in the press, and delivering petitions to foreign legislations," Baron writes, adding that "1919 marked the beginnings of women's public life in Egypt." However, as her study of the photographs of these "ladies' demonstrations" indicates, the events were later mythologised as part of Egypt's subsequent history, and it became hard to unpick fact from fiction. "Photos of female demonstrators and activists," she writes, "appeared in the context of a growing body of photographs of educated women who became metaphors for modernity," though the way such photographs were manipulated by their subjects, as well as by later generations, indicate that these women were well aware of the power the images could wield. Baron is concerned as much by such images of women, and of the representation of the nation as a woman, as she is by the real contributions made by women between the two world wars. Indeed, at a time when the country was struggling to win its independence from British control, Mukhtar's "Egypt's Awakening" and the efforts of Safiyya Zaghloul, Huda Sharawi, Munira Thabit (1902-1967), Fatema (Ruz) al-Yusuf, and Labiba Ahmed (1870s-1951), and others, were valuable and necessary. However, though it drew extensively on female imagery and on actual female participation, the nationalist cause did not give priority to women's emancipation, though this was, and remains, a binding factor in the contributions made by women to nationalist struggles, as is demonstrated by the contemporary nationalist struggle in Palestine and by the past experience of Egyptian women. Earlier examinations of women's movements have emphasised this fact, not least Margot Badran's Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Badran notes that feminist movements should be given a context in terms of their time, place, class structure, ethnicity and creed, and that studies of them should emphasise concrete experience and change over time. Baron certainly attempts to do this, and, like Badran, her conclusion is that the women's organisations that worked during the period studied were made up of "nationalist feminists" in Badran's terms, caught up in the anti-colonial and nationalist struggle that was largely directed by men and not encouraged to pursue the goal of eliminating gender injustice. How women have sought to represent themselves, or how they have been represented, is entirely relevant to any assessment of the nation and the status of women within it. Such representations can reveal women's agendas as individuals with a "cause" and highlight the ways in which their identities are constructed. What women look like, and where they are seen, can also indicate their status. The question of the veil, dramatically removed by Huda Sharawi in the 1920s, and later becoming an acceptable mode of dress, has, for example, now re-emerged in the context of the different 21st century national landscape. One woman having a rather different agenda to that of Sharawi, though still a nationalist one, was Labiba Ahmed, founder of the Society of Egyptian Ladies' Awakening, to whom Baron dedicates an entire chapter. Ahmed was a strong supporter of Mustafa Kamil, and she was outspoken on a number of issues including Palestine, education, and the moral failings allegedly committed by "modern women." Looking through the photographs of Ahmed that appeared in the women's press of the time, including in al-Nahda al-Nisa'iyya (Women's Awakening), Baron concludes that "Labiba seems intent on presenting a counter- image to the secular nationalists and feminists featured prominently in the press in the interwar years: a conservative but active Muslim woman." The idea of women as active or as activists in turn allows reconsideration of the place of Islamist women in contemporary politics. Both during the period studied by Baron's book and today, the ways in which women are able to express their identities are related to the ways in which they present themselves in the public sphere. Both how women dress and the context in which they act is important, both constituting public statements and acknowledging women's emergence from the confines of the household. Finally, Baron's research on Egypt opens up wider consideration of aspects of women's contributions to nationalist causes, much of the history that she describes still being relevant to women's relationships with the nation today. However, it might also be felt that her book, focusing as it does on the contributions made by Egyptian women to the nationalist movement, does not consider women's involvements and communication across borders, which also addresses wider struggles and concerns. By Iman Hamam
