The women’s movement in Egypt has been heralded as improving the lives of women in Egypt and paving the way for women throughout the Arab world. As seen through the eyes of the university educated elite and middle class, this is no doubt true, yet such a narrow view fails to account for the diversity of women’s experience. In Changing Perspectives, Cathlyn Mariscotti provides a critical re-examination of the women’s movement, framing it within the broader economic and political movements occurring in Egypt and abroad. Her nuanced account unveils a rich, differentiated, and complex history of Egyptian women. Drawing upon published journal reports and newspaper articles, Mariscotti explores the tensions between upper class harem women and lower class women. Rather than a unified movement, the author describes the way in which elite feminism created a concept of womanhood that fed into the nationalist cultural ideal, one that was not necessarily progressive for all Egyptian women. Demonstrating active resistance, the non-elite women constructed a model of feminism in line with their own class position and political interests. Mariscotti’s reveals the tension in the movement through the profiles of From this class struggle, a unique, synthesized form of feminism emerged, infused with the politics and culture of Egypt at that time. Humanizing her analysis, the author profiles two outspoken and prominent women who symbolize the conflict: the university educated and wealthy Huda Sha’rawi and Munira Thabit who represented the working class women. The first book to emphasize the class conflict among women, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the fields of women’s studies and Middle East studies.

Since the fall of the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, female activists have faced the problem of how to transform the spirit of the uprising into long-lasting reform of the political and social landscape. In Women and the Egyptian Revolution, Nermin Allam tells the story of the 2011 uprising from the perspective of the women who participated, based on extensive interviews with female protestors and activists. The book offers an oral history of women's engagement in this important historical juncture; it situates women's experience within the socio-economic flows, political trajectories, and historical contours of Egypt. Allam develops a critical vocabulary that captures women's activism and agency by looking both backwards to Egypt's gender history and forwards to the outcomes and future possibilities for women's rights. An important contribution to the under-researched topic of women's engagement in political struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, this book will have a wide-ranging impact on its field and beyond.

The essays in this Oxford Handbook rethink the modern history of one of the most important and influential countries in the Middle East--Egypt. For a country and region so often understood in terms of religion and violence, this work explores environmental, medical, legal, cultural, and political histories. It gives readers an excellent view of the current debates in Egyptian history.

Over the last decade or so, academic and non-academic observers have focussed mainly, if not exclusively on the institutions and places of formal power in the Greater Middle East, depicting politics in the region as a small area limited to local authoritarian rulers. In contrast, this book aims to explore the ‘hidden geographies’ of power, i.e. the political dynamics developing inside, in parallel to, and beyond institutional forums; arguing that these hidden geographies play a crucial role, both in support of and in opposition to official power. By observing less frequented spaces of power, co-option, and negotiation, and particularly by focusing on the interplay between formal and informal power, this interdisciplinary collection provides new insights in the study of the intersection between policy-making and practical political dynamics in the Greater Middle East. Contributing a fresh perspective to a much-discussed topic, Informal Power in the Greater Middle East will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars and those interested in the politics of the region.

Historical Dictionary of Egypt, Fifth Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.

Global Women, Colonial Ports is a transnational history of state-regulated prostitution in the Middle East and North Africa between the two world wars. Beginning with international efforts to eradicate traffic in women and children, Liat Kozma examines French and British policies regarding local and foreign prostitutes in the region and shows how these policies affected and interacted with global migration routes of prostitutes and procurers. In so doing, she reveals how colonial domination mediated global mobility of people, practices, and ideas. Kozma weaves together the perspectives of colonial and local feminists with those of medical doctors, demonstrating that debates on prostitution were globalized and that transnational networks of knowledge and activism existed. She also explores the League of Nations' involvement in this social issue. As a history of the Middle East, the book joins recent scholarship on modern globalization and the integration of the region in global economic, activist, social, and religious interconnectedness.

The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa stands as an authoritative and up-to-date resource on the critical debates, research methods and ongoing reflections on how gender and communication intersect with the economic, social, political, and cultural fabrics of the countries in the MENA region. The Handbook comprises thirty-one chapters written by both established and rising scholars of gender, media, and digital technologies, and will rely on fresh data which seeks to capture the dynamic and complex realities of MENA societies, as well as the tensions and contradictions in the politics of gender and uses of communication technologies. The Handbook is split into six sections: Gender, Identities and Sexualities; The Gender of Politics; Gender and Activism; Gender-Based Violence; Gender and Entrepreneurship; and Gender in Expressive Cultures.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Gender Studies, , language: English, abstract: The Egyptian woman has played an important role, politically, socially, scientifically and culturally, since the ancient Egyptian state. On the political aspect, she was appointed as a queen, socially, she considered as the other half of the society, on the scientific aspect, there were female scientists who got the appreciate of the world and on the cultural side, the woman kept in pace with the man in all intellectual activities. The history had witnessed a period of religious fanaticism which was transferred by the society to what was called as "Al Harem Era" which had the greatest effect on retarding the woman's role in all fields of life. However, through the cultural and civilizational communication that resulted from the Egyptian relations with the west countries through the French occupation in 1798 and the educational missions during Mohammed Ali's era, the callings began gradually for bringing the woman back to her natural status through calling for her education, her freedom and her equality to the man. Mohammed Ali was the first one who entered the Egyptian woman into the education, even that the most successful experiences were in Ismail's era. Then, these callings increased, the books were issued and the feminist newspapers were established, and accordingly, the girls joined to the schools and their numbers had greatly increased. As a result, new generation of the educated women appeared who dedicated themselves to call for equality and getting their full rights. Those women also called for joining the woman to the university and established the feminist department at the university to get the woman a new type of the education which opens all closed doors before her. The study period is considered as one of the most important periods in the history of the Egyptian woman, since the beginning of her joining to the university education until the end of the royal family era during which the woman got her full educational and scientific rights. This study has depended on the historical gradualism for the events; it began from the oldest to the modernist with explaining all events surrounding the events which affected in supporting or hampering the experiment of the higher education for the Egyptian woman. This study was divided into a preliminary chapter, four chapters and conclusion.