Good evening, everyone, but those of you who are here virtually and those of you who are here in the actual world.
My name's Walter Andrews. I'm chairing tonight's seminar and it is a great pleasure.
The speaker is Marilyn Booth.
I've known since forever and she is the husband, Abdullah outSo, professor for the study of contemporary Arab world title.
She has extremely broad research interests. I'll mention just a few of them.
She's written on early feminism and national nationalist Islamist discourses in Arabic speaking world,
autobiography biography in Arabism and Francophone,
Middle East and North Africa, literature and politics of Arab Arabic quilts and the history of Arabic periodicals,
particularly satirical press and the women's press is just a few.
Marilyn often describes herself more as a historian who works on literature than as the literary scholar, but really,
she's just an exemplary scholar in terms of the interdisciplinary scope of her research and publishing in a literary and historical scholarship.
She also does literary translation amongst her literary translations.
I think she has at least a dozen of them to 18.
I only found it to be visible, not to mention this celestial bodies that many writers have, which won the international Man Booker prise in 2019,
which is one of the major literary prises in the world which is given to a
work of fiction translated into English and awarded equally to the translator.
The author just published too many works linked to tonight's lecture to mention all of them.
I can't even begin to summarise the articles, book chapters and edited volumes.
There are two monographs which is published since 2008, and I will mention.
One is classes of ladies appointment spaces writing feminist history through biography in Egypt, and the other is men who like to be multiply.
Biography, gender, politics and agents. Tonight's lecture builds both works and is a book launch.
She's been working on this book for a very long time.
It's unfortunate for those of you who are here virtually because there is going to actually be drinks after the lecture.
Virtual drinks, I guess this is the intellectual biography of early Arabic,
of the early Arabic feminists saying it's the West who lived in the latter half of the 19th century and to study her life in Ottoman Syria,
Egypt in the context of radical debates on gender, modernity and the good society.
The time of lecture is the same as the book the career and communities of Santaco as feminist thinking and the This Egypt.
It's an honour to introduce someone who really is a giant in our field and in our community.
And so I gave you this renowned blue. Thank you very much, Walter, for that extremely generous introduction.
It's a pleasure to be here. I feel like I'm a family. That's not only because of their Walter.
And Michael for a very long time, but it's just wonderful to be back in the Middle East, where so much of my intellectual formation has happened,
and I'm delighted that this is the first in-person lecture that we've been able to have.
I am, of course, giving a lecture in person for over two years, so I have to see how it goes in the spring of nineteen hundred.
A furious reaction erupted in the Egyptian press in response to the Arabic translation.
French Foreign Minister Gabriele Panopto titled Simply This Slam,
the French original was aimed at a French audience and published in a Paris magazine.
It's quite an odd feeling for a Dutch final diatribe, with worries about France's imperial future in Africa for readers in Egypt.
It represented the worst of European imperialist Orientalism. Famously, Egypt's Mufti Mohammed Abdu responded immediately and eloquently.
Many lesser known figures also responded One intervention has gone unnoticed was an article by
Cinepolis that appeared in the national newspapers and the web on the 28th of April 19 hundreds.
And I just want to say before going on all the quotations in this talk or translation my translations from the Arabic.
So if you have any questions about them, feel free to ask. Also, I'm not going to read the whole thing.
I'm just it's up there for you to get a taste, but I'll read parts of these quotations.
So she says when it appeared on that particular day, we were at a women's gathering.
One of the ladies picked it up and began to read it out loud as we listened until we got to the point.
60ml was quoted, excluding his comments on the Tomb of the Prophet and his accusations against the religion itself.
When we heard this of operating, the sense of pride,
honour and self-respect was erupting so strongly in the latest polls that we wish to sit inside a war in which the players,
after some trenchant comments on the political and moral bankruptcy of the local male ruling with the author returns to the site of investigation.
The women's meeting? Likely. She said someone can come from the hands of women to resolve such a thorny problem,
one which is stoning men when women are inside hijabs and have no ability to listen and find anything other ways to take political decisions.
I said, yes, we are inside cages and we're very few at present, but a rainstorm starts with a single drop.
The article went on to hear women's collective work.
The women became determined to raise their sons and daughters on religious principles and national local manufacturers,
etc. The assemblage of women determined that women imitating the Europeans as much as possible and none would deal with Europe's merchants.
They would do business only with Muslim merchants. They would implant this virtue in the hearts of their daughters.
And thus, before a quarter-century passed with no trace of European farmers, will be found in east.
Now, this was years before the famous call for a boycott by post-war nationalist women in Egypt.
So it's and it's not something that I've ever heard, seen, referred to note the language.
What was probably a gathering of friends in a home takes on political heft and a split making a formal declaration of a boycott.
It's emblematic of this author's bold style, so we do not know whether a boycott was actually attempted.
My book addresses the career of a writer whose views are strikingly distinct amongst the Arab leaders of her era.
I consider xenophobic writings and other actions within the context of gender as a key axis of the 19th century,
Arab acknowledged then as later as the master.
And also with reference to emerging anti-colonial sources,
the book traces one individual's tenacious engagement with contentious issues while embedding an individual's body of
work within the communities of discourse of personal connexion and political negotiation in which it's often moved,
spoke at times to inspire. What I want to do is talk a little bit about her life history,
which is unusual and move from that into the whole problem of sources when one is trying to write a biography.
I then want to talk about some key words which are part of my title book title.
And to use that as a way to talk about what she wrote, focussing on her essays.
I'd love to talk about the end of her life. It's absolutely fascinating.
It's also very problematic in a different way for biography, but I may not have time.
So you're very welcome to ask the questions and answers if you're interested.
So I now want to put up another quotation from a letter that was sent to the Beirut newspaper, The Standard,
in March 1892, eight years before she was writing, and the rest of St. Francis to the director of the Senate, shall.
I cannot express my gratitude for your hard work commitment and standing visible in society.
Speaking for my sisters, women of the East, I thank you for your efforts,
and I think women of the West are striving towards excellence, surpassing the men in many areas.
God willing, we'll get to the same place amongst countless writings and every branch of knowledge, always concerning our women.
A few utterances by unknown women or bits of poetry secluded in remote squares in the ancient books that no one is.
Vitally concerned, I began considering what it would take to create a force that would recognise and eliminate the excellence of women.
I found no solution but to propose and play others like the streets, which is designed to protect to action, including everyone.
But since this is the age of knowledge, an important era in women's education,
I wanted to join the ground with all the life histories I could get through the Senate.
I call on my sisters who wish to have their life histories and my book to send them to me or my brother.
Muhammad Ali is a lawyer in civil.
The book she speaks of was a massive biographical dictionary of world women in Arabic, which saw the light of day in 1895.
My previous monograph, The One That Walter mentioned there,
that in 2015 was a history of this book because you can see how obsessed with this woman two monographs on she just the letter.
Her letter was a call for contributions and an app for her project,
but it can also be seen as an implicit argument for women's writing autobiographically,
highlighting their knowledge in an era when elite women's names were most often not made public, let alone their lives under understated.
This may have been, but the sentence was still a provocative suggestion about women as public figures with his
own assumption of her role in public life is the reason that I've long been fascinated by it.
But the letter also conjures up a paradox, as his own biography does not appear in the volume or really else.
In fact, we know very little that is certain about his life, and there are competing narratives.
This biographical elusiveness from a woman who spent so much time compiling biographies
of other others has certainly been a shaping factor in the way that I written this book.
Her life was starkly different to those the lives of most of the small group of
published a rather than female writers in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s.
First,
Boaz was born in South Lebanon in a Shiite community that was on the fringes of Arab Autumn and life by virtue of geography and communal longings.
But it was also a community long known research and literary prowess as a she in her adult life in Egypt,
the West was an absolutely tiny religious minority, and it isn't surprising that her she background is barely visible in the writings.
Second, the West did not have a wealthy or learnt first family behind her, though she and her brother nearly had some cultural access.
As a young girl, she became attached to the local feudal rulers household, and she got her first literary training from the same year.
But top prospects ultimate into last night.
This is another unusual feature to be literary that are rarely changed by a female poet in the south of Lebanon.
It's not clear when, how or why the West emigrated from Lebanon to Egypt.
There seems to have been a disastrous early marriage to an employee of the year and the subsequent divorce.
Some sources claim that she married an Egyptian military man, but there's no evidence for that.
And I suspect these catching actually female immigrating to the south of Lebanon to urban Egypt unless it involves a husband,
she may have emigrated with her brother in Cairo. She probably lived with him, and I have something of his career.
She began her published career with essays in major Arabic newspapers and came to
the attention of another newspaper editor and began publishing in his journal.
These are rather fascinating,
somewhat pathetic and understudied figures who I spent also spent a lot of time on in the book has an estimate of the way they're book.
Published many of her essays in this newspaper, and I asked why she did publish there.
And I scrutinised the news, gender politics as I do that.
But the more prominent newspapers that Anderson, apparently, which was also published,
I also follow her work for the first Arabic magazine for women produced by women, which I see as a collective project.
Boaz went on to publish her biographical dictionary many newspaper essays,
two novels and a play well known at least to a very small community of newspaper and book readers.
When she died in 1914, the obituary in the background was unusually long for a female, but it included nothing about her life trajectory,
including her quite fascinating later life, which included another marriage and divorce and a stint to of the city's spy network.
After her death, her voice seemed to disappear in print, except for publications with entries biographical fiction.
So she's a fascinating, intriguing figure.
Biographically Hickok is not a traditional biography because so much is unknown, so I do do a lot of sleuthing and speculation.
In fact, the conflicting narratives that we have immediately raised a frustrating question When was she born?
The dates usually given are 1846 and 1860, and those are a generations apart.
They would mean different things, but her relationships as a child and as an adult, for example,
her mentor Fatima, was born in 1840, where they near contemporaries were 20 years apart in age difference.
To make things more interesting, I suspect that later in life, she rewrote her own biography, so it was never attributed to her.
A brief biographical notice surfaced in two texts in 1995 and 1996.
I'm not going to read it, but just to say this CV like narrative president born in 1860,
immigrating to Alexandria as a child with his family being educated by chance and turning into a writer.
Nothing about marriages, divorces, slightly problematic journeys, let alone spike with all of this uncertainty.
What does one do? Partly because of the West, but also because this is the way it works.
I try to imagine and to read her within various communities of discourse while not ignoring the life.
This brings us to the terms I use in the book's title, which signal the French.
So I'm going to start with feminist thinking and then move into community, and I may or may not have time to get.
What feminism means in a 19th century context anywhere in the world is the question in this exercise.
Many scholars like feminism itself, the answers are varied and multifaceted.
Drawing on alternative terminologies sensitive to the many ways women and men have sought to think about gender differentiation,
its sources and its effects. Some historians avoid using the term prior to the 20th century,
since feminism only emerged in the context of French activism in the late 19th century as a term.
Others point to the multiple meanings the label has for those who did adopt it.
Scholars of European colonialism emphasised the imperial legacies to which feminism has been put.
But historians of more American humanism estimate the exclusionary, racist outlooks of many white feminists, individuals and groups.
There's no single way to think feminism for any context,
scholarship on Egypt in this period emphasises women's contributions to a vigorous public debate and
to activity underpinning the emergence of the feminist movement in writing and publishing education,
benevolence and politics.
It's now recognised that before the 1899 male lawyer A-plus in the main factory, which is so often seen as initiating a debate long before that,
women and men were already deeply engaged in the question of gender norms and gender defined rights.
Studies also highlight the importance of the women's question to the formation of Egyptian anti-colonial
nationalism and associated women's discourses that critically assessed zero American societies.
Reformers sought legal and attitudinal changes to family structure as essential to modernity.
They did this partly through an emerging discourse of companionate marriage, which was meant to encourage notions of gender and integrate women,
embraced nationalist projects, but not always on the terms articulated by masculine leaderships.
If women worked in anticipation of the nation and if what they said publicly was aimed at reassuring audiences of their dedication to the nation,
women's agendas were not only about the nation, nor were women in accord with each other.
Confronting the discursive formation I study,
I find it useful to think feminist as an analytic concept rather than as a label that captures what I think.
So let's just say so. I adopt an analytics of feminist thinking that's narrower than the descriptive usage of the term feminism often denotes.
This is not to suppress or denigrate alternative activism or to deny that their work changed women's and men's lives beneficially.
But we can only understand the extent and the limits of change if we appreciate the
range of use in one discursive context for Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s.
Such distinctions have remained, I believe, under addressing symptoms of structural gender decline in equality in a hierarchical system.
Feminist thinking in the way that I use it goes beyond the symptomatic to recognise and challenge underlying attitudes or these systems,
whether defined as patriarchal male dominance or nastiness.
And also to unpack social sexual structures that produce these sort of manifestations,
feminist thinking in this sense is distinguished from gender reform, which seeks to improve conditions for girls and women.
But without critique of the underlying system,
reformers might regard such changes as necessary to modernise or even perpetuate the patriarchal system,
leaving its structure and its assumptions in place.
These assumptions include the notion of natural gender, the centrality of paternity and property transfer,
the patrolling and attempted management of women's sexuality through formulations of honour to ensure paternity,
but also to discipline females and to absolve males.
It also is this assumption that family members,
under the caption of the father the rejection of women's story as formal community leaders and their exclusion from political decision-making,
buttressing the notion of the male head of household as political subject.
It's very striking when one reads the books and articles on women by male reformers of this time and later that for most of them,
their notions of learnt domesticity and companionate marriage ambitions.
No changes in structures of authority.
Thus, feminist thinking in the sense I use it as not only a betterment, although that's part of it, nor a struggle for equal rights.
It's a politics grounded in an analysis of power in society.
The Palestine gender, as a fundamental human best with the choice system, is a structure of hierarchy wherein the female is the subordinated term.
It is also a recognition that the most basic privilege of being classified
male is the right to define as low as to maintain that relationship of power.
In other words, to declare what a woman is in of it, as in other languages.
The women question was a rubric under which multiple issues that were also very much about men were discussed.
The explicit focus was usually unanimous and the notion of the male person as consent.
Humanity unmarked by gender was one of the mechanisms by which this definition 40 was and is maintained.
So feminist thinking entails not only the display of patriarchy as a system that privileges male authority,
but recognition as the disciplinary means to maintain compliance through persuasion,
psychological pressure and resort to tradition, to legal structures, to force acts and the threat of violence.
What I'm saying? These are not new insights. I I'm certainly not the first to define patriarchy in this way, by no means,
but I think that there's been insufficient attention to the range of views within the early Arabism debates or gender,
and I think it's important to try to understand a range of views and what.
Singapore is wrote on the same topics as did others, the necessity for girls education, shortcomings in the marital regime,
the durability of beliefs harmful to personal health and men's bad behaviours,
as well as their cryptocurrencies, she wrote on issues of social justice and women's work.
And I have just these are the middle. I have chapters in my book on each of these issues,
and I try very hard to make my chapters stand alone chapters so that nobody has to read the whole book.
I got a very big book, but unlike most, is so,
as his writings comprised a critique of the prevailing understandings of sex gender as defining individuals social possibilities.
And her essay argued that keeping the relationship in place required and encouraged men's ongoing tactics of psychological and physical subversion.
In one of her early, earliest published essays, I Translate the title as Phyllis does not arise from material plenitude for posterity.
But we ask again the strong characterisations of married women's lives.
She did such a reprise and reject arguments made by those who oppose changes in marriage practises, girls education and female mobility.
The standard version if girls were educated, they would become just dissatisfied with their accepted.
What might they be too uppity to do housework,
too occupied with purchasing luxury goods and initiating social engagements to be thrifty wives and mothers?
So as Caustically rewrote that argument in order to demolish it with her provocative gloss, she suggested that the roots of this discontent.
Thus, the reasons for denying females in education were something else.
So she sets it up here. And then she says the husband's argument is that if women learnt the true nature of society,
the circumstances of various classes of people and the way things are at present,
the women would become the husbands assert malcontent with their lives where they would detest the rule of their despotic husbands
and the knowledge and learning to lead them to break the right of obedience and emerge from the music bondage to the arena,
of course, was not what the husbands were saying. But it's her unpacking of the argument that she used hyperbole.
Tactically, her language mocked the spirit scare discourse of those opposing girls education.
At the same time, the text created a disconnect between these opponent's views that free up
freedom as a euphemism for young woman's alleged sexual spatial improprieties,
freedom as licentiousness and her own understanding of freedom as a space of self-realisation and necessary world.
Felicity, which she talks about later in the same essay,
saying it means the ability to exercise one's intelligence for the good itself, family and society.
I argue in the book that this understanding of what we do is also fundamental to reflection.
Perhaps this is hyperbole was not hyperbolic at all through an accumulating lexicon of domination and
perverse subordination for language suggested what it is that women would babies through education,
not an investment in consumption or disdain for domestic work reasons with the despotism
practised against gay marriage and the confidence to contest its outcomes going further.
So as its ratings suggest, she recognises the concept of a natural division of labour based on constricting women's work to family maintenance,
coupled with a patriarchal structure of authority, would not be an adequate basis for social relations founded on mutual recognition and consent.
Again, I think this distinguishes her from those who are interested in change on the
ground did not see these structures as by definition subversive to women,
were detrimental to human relations.
Many of the interlocutors espoused a different or separate but equal approach to women's work is just as valuable as men's,
and it required and manifested equivalent mental and physical capabilities, but it was different from work.
This was the substance of the debate in print,
as Lebanese writer kind of learnt so fiercely admonish women not to think about stepping over the threshold and out of domestic work,
and criticise British suffragists for doing so that they supported the suffragists as exerting themselves for their own futures and their nations.
And she criticised women who didn't support them implicitly, including running as lazy.
You didn't like this very much, you wanted to take Moranis out, maintained a separation between feminine families and masculine, or at least it did.
Snow Edition with separate spheres is a prescriptive concept only unevenly and partially descriptive.
But we reminded Simone that many women in Egypt and Europe had long worked outside the home to support themselves and their families.
The very tradition public private is a fairly recent concept of European origins rooted in the labour and spatial
transformations of the Industrial Revolution and capitalist organisation with relations with production,
which benefited from maintaining a notion of male breadwinner with women's unmatched work in
providing assistance support that Egypt in the Ottoman Empire were entangled in an uneven,
European led global capitalist nexus by the late 19th century before.
That may have encouraged the grafting on this notion of gender labour division
to existing spatial social codes that were already well entrenched locally.
But so, as is writing, offers a reminder that this was not contested.
Her final submission in the debate with Romney is perhaps a statement of a non-essentials
stance that also rejected a static state historical view of gender roles.
And I'm sorry again, I wish I had time to read all of these.
So as did not contest the ongoing reality of women's and men's lives as different, differently cited physically and in social roles.
But she rejected notions of hierarchical, different sanctions by nature.
She did not celebrate women's special qualities or argue that they were different people,
though she did insist that women's reproductive work be respected and valued as labour.
She insisted that there was no realm of work that women as a category did not form,
even as she noted that in the here and now elite Muslim women's accustomed spatial social practises did,
in a practical sense, bar certain kinds of work. Thus, Phyllis acknowledged the ongoing social consequences of sexual difference.
Concepts that made in sustainable had emerged in the context of Western Europeans,
specifically a doctrine of abstract individualism leading in terms of sex in relation to a constitutive paradox.
The abstract individual as basis of the political self was qualified in the human world politics through categorical exclusions,
including out of females from the revolutionary political self-image of the French
Revolution or from the liberal white sphere and such intimate of British common law.
Yet women had to appeal to that abstract experience, subject to that human entity on the basis of a gendered self-image that the abstraction erased.
One might argue, on the other hand, that those who based their outlooks in an Islamic ethical field did not face this dilemma.
Rather than an abstract disembodied subject,
one might supermodel in the body and gendered relievers equally responsible before God, as addressed in her arms.
But whereas Islamic positioning undergirded the argument for a non patriarchal non-essentials viewpoint on gender,
invoking the Sharia as a universal moral code for human rights.
At the same time, and crucially, like her male reformist peers,
women such as the argue that law and other social institutions formulated from time to
a rereading of the foundational texts of Islamic practise were not divinely ordained,
but were the changeable products of human interpretation. And in that way, she was very similar to some of the very well-known male Muslim modernists.
Debates in Arabic and the politics of gender were entangled with an coterminous group.
It's important to keep this in mind. Debates are occurring literally across the world, women and men in Egypt.
We're aware of what was going on elsewhere of feminist and other gender activists, including anti-feminist arguments and initiatives in many places.
The arguments were part of what was just no simple borrowing, but rather savvy adaptations, a kind of lateral thinking.
We can appreciate gender activism and within them feminism's as local police presences while remaining sensitive to particular trajectories,
Lopez perceived your actions as part of a trans societal concern.
But this does not mean she saw four interventions as derivative. It often seems to be assumed that Arab intellectuals borrowings from Western sources
constituted new standards and that these new ideas supported more flexible gender,
which the whole Westernisation thing while introducing modern notions of domesticity.
But this is only part of the story. Reading the Arabic press, Leslie,
it's evident that narrowly restricted often anti-feminist or even misogynist
European pronouncements on gender were conceived and translated just as avidly.
American pundits who were antisemitism cited European authorities in support of the socialist,
nature driven views about the socialist organisation in an 1894 debate, which is the subject of one of our chapters.
Physician aminos use biomedical distress developed in Europe to shore up a deeply conservative resistance to women's activism and even their speech.
His misogynist outlook became more pronounced, with women challenging entrenched.
It's also been assumed, although I think recent work changing this, that it was the West were Westernised Assyrian Christian immigrants such as.
Who were the main conduits of these imported ideas? To the extent this is true,
it's important to keep in mind that they all come true under Afghan figures whose writings Panopto
highly patriarchal views of gender congenial to one prevalent indigenous patriarchal outlooks,
often based as western Europeans on readings of the Bible, Egyptian courts and Muslims also pervade the range of European views.
But it's important to remember that identity categories are not very useful in identifying individual stances on the meanings of gender.
Although an individual's background training and really flexible Typekit varies.
They used. So talking a little bit, moving a little bit to the question of community,
placing feminism within the broader field of the women question or more accurately,
the gender question we see the founders did right on the same issues that others did, but with different emphasis on girls education.
She emphasised non gendered aspirations for the good life, which, in her view, the educated as they seem.
She emphasised education as a means to no one's rights. That's just one example.
She moved between incisive analysis of attitudes and calls for practical action.
The latter might get women to work together performative me if it's suggests they were already working together, as in the 1990s.
It's no response for rhetoric and choices. Then you sometimes term female leadership, sometimes a non gendered one in late,
as she addressed the women of Egypt as a category in need of self-examination.
She held different communities of gender, of state of origin belonging.
Observing its work in public discourse means not only considering it genetically and generically,
but also considering how she noted the arguments and to whom she was speaking for communities of distress.
She was a forthright and often quite impolite debater and hence unusual for a woman.
I want my readers to enter the rhetorical space of that decade to sense the ways that females and many others talk about these issues.
A methodology of deep listening, which is what I try to practise,
requires attention to multiple and contentious discourses of key words such as progress,
civilisation, rights, nature and still listening in on the rhetorical uses of terminology.
The categories through which people argued is a reminder of its intelligence and creativity of any intellectual debate,
even as one also registers its conditions of possibility. Attending to the inception of vocabularies obsessed with language, the uses of ambiguity,
irony and silence means asking how writers situated themselves within certain conventions, only to push against visual mediums.
Also, we have to ponder how language use might intersect with gender assignment.
What risks did women take in using the language of aspect,
or how could women into the language of jurisprudence an arena almost exclusively mask the centuries?
These questions are just crucial because poets and other women have not only to engage the gender question,
but also to enact the intellectual subjectivity that some, such as an employee, tried to deny to women.
So my approach highlights her eclectic tactics, her reliance on the standings of social mobilisation articulated as Islamic for
knowledgeable yet original these spaces and her proposals way of engaging interlocutors.
In a long running debate with a minor official in the customs administration,
Boaz addressed the exploitation of late versions of this comic strip and its sources
as a patriarchal mechanism to keep women subordinate and unhealthy marriage foes use
logic arguments of history and knowledge of Islamic sources to reject spouses understanding
of gender as implacably cyberspace based on his reading of the creation story.
The current diction and the team that was launched this text from the notion of Australia as a principle
of gender hierarchy you began to seriously serially publish in the Magazine for Tots in early 1893.
Very soon, so is under a pseudonym attacked him in the same journal, initiating what became a very complicated exchange in your newspaper.
I read a piece by the distinguished writer Christian Affinity Fellowship,
where he manifests as thoroughly partisanship through partisanship towards the sex,
showing his prejudice towards our women, women, sex and other matters,
the truth of which I will make clear to them as long as we preserves the etiquette of that exchange.
If he does not, I will abandon reasoned debate and renounce and reject his works where it openly proceeds to do over the next couple of months.
And I'm just going to give you again not reading it, but just a taste of how Perez's responses escalated in tone and how she used satirical.
Except your arrogance compelled you to depart from the requirements of proper ideas, and she calls him an escalating Oh Samus scholar.
You are indeed the philosopher of the age and so forth. She uses this degree to great effect.
The exchange, amongst other things, does show how visceral the debates over the meaning of Islamic sources to contemporary gender politics were,
at least for some teenagers at that time.
As the debate suggests, community adjustments are not always comfortable and supportive wherever feminism has existed,
so has patriarchy that such throughout Europe,
the 1890s for a decade of feminist activism and therefore acceptance that women have this scorn and hostility
for airing their ambitions is not in any simple sense about women's accession to public political rights.
Surveying 19th century gender rights in Britain, when Britain argues that quote, it was men's power in the private spirit,
it was perceived to be threatened by proposals to give married women the right to vote to others.
Not simply. It was indeed a sports masculine authority were perceived to be weakening the need to sort of move and felt more strongly.
We see this in the 80s and 90s Arab media states as male editors who would
declare themselves supportive to women's ambitions for more public engagement.
We're sharply critical of women who chose to write about rights.
The chair for girls education, and they're very explicit about it, we women, we need you to write about child here.
Stop writing about race when in 1892 voters are running on the appropriateness of women's suffrage in an Egypt occupied by Britain?
No one has political rights. In a sense, this gives more significance to the turbulence that has support for British suffrage and
stood up for arguments not possibly have any foreseeable impact in the local level.
The suggestion was too much for the liberal man who generously published women's votes in newspapers like Members of Parliament in Britain.
These male some intellectuals were anxious to maintain masculine authority in the family by defining a clear sexual division of labour,
including what women were allowed to write about.
The seriousness of the house could not agree with them as on suffrage, even as the editors presented themselves as supporters of women's rights.
And first, they were the ones who defined what they meant by women's rights.
Several years later, a supporter of hers, Ahmed, outed the same editor of Science News newspaper of Japan celebrated the pre-eminence of a jumble.
I am a woman. Zainab poses amongst the published Women Writers of the time, but in the same breath we chided her for having extreme views.
Assuming the rightness of masculine authority necessarily meant a same review of male behaviour as responsible
and benign xenophobes and a few other women suggested that men's conclusions about male behaviour,
we're looking at sexual behaviour.
They knew the tensions between notions of what was 12 of companionate marriage and implacable masculine authority the phone.
They knew the degree to which companionate marriage rested on female minds.
All right. I'll just quickly say, like other writers who is engaged in self-promotion activities, sending your books to newspaper editors,
responding promptly when a periodical got something wrong or omitted her name and rejecting others critiques with her view.
I've given you a taste of her debating style.
Forceful and persistent in later life, she negotiated restrictions on female seclusion as older women, especially older single women, could do.
And that's what she was, and she was a physical presence in journal offices.
She had to make her own living in that time and with some evidence that she actually tried to do this by peddling her own books in the household.
So just like her own life, did not adhere to prevailing expectations for women this year.
The choice that she made to be single writing and publishing to the two marriages actually.
And just the way that she was so out there, so public and the way she was growing and other women to the public lead me to call her a career.
Most important thing is her insistence throughout that women should be public figures.
She used the rhetorical conceit a number of times,
addressing men as a group of declaring that she and women generally could see the men clearly through hijab as the hijab as gender segregation.
So instead of through access to newspapers, through women's conversations and for discussions with men,
public explanations work was neither invisible nor inaccessible to women.
No career, however, becomes a fixture of some irony influenzas later life, as does ability,
but she became a paid informer for the palace in the last decade of her life.
And ironically, the only real evidence I have of her daily life are the reports that she wrote for the Palace.
And they are totally fascinating, and I translate a number of them in the final chapter of my book.
I can't go into you here. It's way too complicated.
But basically, she was asked to spy on the households of various figures and as her handlers said when he wrote to the city saying,
I've got this woman, I really want to hire her. Because he says, after all, men don't know how to keep secrets.
They tell their wives everything and their wives, which help them everything.
And they told her a lot. This is really uncomfortable.
However, as a biographer, as a feminist biographer,
as somebody who identifies with Wisam for less and just worked under a long time because at this point in her life,
you see her betraying people, using girls education cynically and trying to draw other men into the spy network.
This is not really this kind of wants to find, but I think it's really in a way it's really good because not only is it fascinating
and it shows how important households and women were to the political scene,
and it also shows how much the women knew. She transcribed conversations amongst the women about the latest newspapers that have
started publishing and who runs them as these women know exactly what's going on.
But it also makes when you think about the messiness of life and the fact that we cannot idealise our subjects
and we have to take in all parts of life and acknowledge that acknowledge that misunderstandings about it.
So in some ways, it's feminist thinking, French Islamic ethical worldview,
this distinct not only from prevailing separate but equal views of gender abilities,
but also from prevailing modernist views imposing a non-essentials open ended notion of gender.
This is really quite remarkable for that leads anywhere, not just in Egypt.
Her approach is particularly striking given the durability of the notion of fixed,
biologically determined gender assignment, but still includes debates on Islam and gender.
So often not always supporting her rhetoric was not about identity, but about position.
It was less about process itself than about her sense of audience and the persona she wanted to protect.
And actually, she she very saw lexicon, according to the audience, who is very savvy about that.
On one level, she gives an Islamic lexicon to describe aspects of a particular everyday practise on another level.
She applied it as a universal or potentially shareable grounding for the good society.
On occasion, she chose terms associated with Islamic practise to characterise Europeans and non-Muslim segment.
I'm not suggesting that this was cynical. Surely it founded in personal belief,
but it was still a rhetorical political choice that it became more pronounced as
a speaking position and as a collective identity and related writings provides a
graphic example of how European Islamophobic discourse around nineteen hundreds
helped to create the Muslim solidarity that this same disparate soldier fought.
I've only been able to give you a taste of the process, work right, and I haven't even touched on the novels play,
but I hope this suggests the vitality and intensity of late vitamins, including Egyptian intellectuals,
engagements with questions of gender as meaning as central to understanding
political and social organisation in a changing world of gender assignment,
which I was accused the misogynist doctor difficulty of mislabelling as this tyranny
that you found nature and just wrote in one of her many contributions to public debate.
Thank you very much. Thank you. OK, I neglected to mention at the beginning,
perhaps because I was dazzled by the presence of a live audience for the first time in two years
that those of you who are attending remotely can ask question by using the Q&A function on Zoom.
And so if you take your questions there, I will try to beat it out.
And if you want to be anonymous, then say so. Otherwise I will identify you.
I have a question about her sheer background. I mean, in my early contemporary experience,
I have sometimes been taken aback by the negative attitudes expressed towards shades by Egyptians who have never actually met a real person.
I'm guessing that in the late 19th, early 20th century, things were very different,
but I'm wondering what level of awareness there was of her background and whether it mattered to people and if so, how.
And I was actually also wondering if did from the background gave her a kind of insider outsider status,
which perhaps lends itself to things like espionage, but also lent itself to things like, you know, her relatively radical issues?
Those are all really good questions, and I've wondered about them a lot.
The only place that I've seen where her background comes in explicitly in her writings is in her biographical dictionary.
There are actually more biographies of either Shiite or protege or supporters of Ali than you might expect.
And whenever she mentions the name Alia, she says she either says a lot about the word or my own my.
So there's a little bit of a thing there, but it's it's pretty, pretty minor.
It's really hard to know how much people knew and what they thought.
And in some ways, in some cases, it seems that people even assumed that she was Egyptian, which, you know,
then you might think, Well, this kind of suggests that maybe she did immigrate pretty early if she found it.
You know, it's one of these many question marks that we have. It also may be because she wasn't.
These may have been people who didn't hear her voice. After all, she was sitting at home writing and sending things to newspapers.
But even a couple of these newspaper editors kind of assume that she's Egyptian or seemed to think so.
And so it's very there's just none of the biographies.
Is there anything? And she is celebrated, as I mentioned to the editor inside an insider.
You know, he celebrates her in his journal, which is a journal of human history and identity.
But I'm not saying I don't think people in Egypt are really reading that.
And so, you know, I'm not sure how many people really, really did know.
And then what difference does it make? Who knows? I mean, it's a big question mark also.
Here she is with all these quite radical views. She was also monolingual.
She didn't read any European languages.
I'm not suggesting that it would have to come from Europe, but I mean, it's just that she's she's somebody who you might not expect this or did that.
It had something to do with having this somewhat unorthodox background.
Did it have anything to do with being, Gee, I can't. I don't.
I don't argue that it does, because I have no, that's just too speculative.
There's just no indication, but it's interesting to think about.
Sorry, that's not a very good answer, but but it's the best, I guess.
So I want to talk a little with that person because it reminds you.
Yeah, I should say in the book, I really enjoyed it.
So guys in a funny 150 expressions and.
I've got the election, and I I've you some speculation about whether this is possible in this country.
And as far as I can tell her sort of participation in those debates in the early 20th century as a just a Muslim,
I mean she she seems to be pretty participating in Sunni debates as much as any of the debates.
And I just wonder, are these identities becoming more salient now?
I have a similar experience to Walter about going there.
And yeah, so yeah, I think it's a good question.
I think it would take a lot more of the collective research to think about these.
I think the really important questions is, you know, maybe both of these identities weren't maybe a salient then, but at the same time,
maybe they did give somebody more of an insider outsider perspective that made it easier to kind of step back and see things.
And that's that's that's that's quite possible. It would be great to have some kind of collective research project where we can look at all these
figures and just try to pick some of this apart and look at some of their writings and think,
is there a way in which we can see this as somehow linked in to these these identities?
So, you know, I would love to explore that more.
On the other hand, as you may have gathered from my paper, I'm very wary of sort of linking an identity because that so often is done.
I'm so sick of this. Like, Oh, the westernised Syrian Christians did this and the Muslims did that.
Well, it was not that straightforward.
And so I I'm a little bit, but I do think these are absolutely fascinating questions and especially these kind of,
you know, people coming from these various kinds of minority backgrounds.
What what does that give them? So again, I don't have more of an answer, but I think it's a great, great question to think about.
But let me read one of the online questions, this is from Rosa Marx.
Your question is, first of all, she says, thank you so much for your talk. I was just wondering,
do you think policies and means conceptions of modern woman and modern gender relations had a positive effect on Egyptian women as a whole,
which I think is kind of a legacy question, no longer language that is also an extremely good and difficult question, as I said early on.
You know, she kind of disappears from view after her death,
except that quite a few writers go on using entries from her biographical dictionary and reproducing those.
So you see those and you see them not only an error that you see them in Turkish, for instance.
It's really it's really rich. And I I'm not sure I need to do more thinking about her legacy.
Originally, I was going to do that in this book, but I kind of ran out of steam.
And I also was already to lunch, and I also kind of thought, maybe it's just going to end with her death.
Let's leave it there. And I think one thing to think about is that so she died a few months before World War One started and after the war,
things have changed much and there was a whole new generation of activists.
And also, I think because she wasn't Egyptian, she kind of wasn't remembered in the same way that some of the Egyptian figures,
such as ancient time war happening, also were remembered.
It's really hard to know. I wish I knew more about the impact, but there isn't.
Unfortunately, there isn't really any evidence that people were reading her after the war.
So part of me, as much as I think she's amazing and she's worth studying there is always that if she's not, you know, if your work doesn't last.
But I do suspect that probably at least for the the relatively small number of activists, probably her work was significant.
And in that sense, we might see a longer kind of influence, but I can't point to any very specific way.
And in fact, I think she's much more radical in her thinking than a lot of this sort of.
A lot of the debates that are that have gone on since then. I think you right?
I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about why admissions threats outside of Egypt?
Yeah, again, I don't know, and this is always when one is a text in that period, readerships are very hard to pass.
She did write, and she probably was read to some extent because these some of these journals that she
wrote in we know things related outside of Egypt and even outside of the Arab world.
In fact, it was always having problems with the British, not allowing it into India or the French not allowing it into Algeria.
So we know there were attempts and we do know that people elsewhere did read this,
and some people in Europe were reading these these journals because you get letters coming in.
So, so now of course, I can't say for sure if they were reading her, but they were definitely there were these.
These newspapers were circulated,
and one thing that is really interesting about her is that she definitely had a sense of of getting herself out there.
She want it is clear that she wanted to be in the major newspapers and she probably published in the Mail both because she was
a congenial place and its editor really became kind of a mentor to her also because he probably just gave her more space.
We don't know in terms of the other editors, did they say, Oh, well, we've published you once or twice, that's enough.
Or, Oh, we didn't realise how wonderful it is for women to be single, so we're not going to publish anymore.
We don't. We don't know. We do know with the with the said and her, the Beirut newspaper that the Ottoman censors.
And about late 1894, early 1895.
Actually, come to the offices of the Senate, the House, and they say, we've got all these articles with women's names on them.
Are these really by women? And the editor says, Oh yes. And he says we'll just stop that because women should not be writing these things.
And it's. And I had it before I found that that source, I had wondered because there is a point where instead of.
Suddenly there seemed to be no women and you're like, What's going on?
And it was it is around the same time that as such that the first women's magazine, which I also talk about a lot in the book got started.
So you think, well, maybe these women just kind of migrated from the centre help.
But it seems there was also there was also a push. So I think they were being read, but it was not an easy kind of situation.
And of course, we have to keep in mind that the numbers of literate people were small.
On the other hand, newspapers did get read out loud, as we see in that wonderful vignette.
She's talking about the women reading a riot. So, you know, it's hard to.
I think some people did. But again, I have no, I don't have any sort of like letter to an editor saying I read so of, you know, I mean,
other people talk about in the in other journals they talk about, Oh, you know, we read what the wonderful fellows wrote.
But again, you don't know how seriously we take that.
Really, it's because this is also part of a sort of culture of mutual pats on the back amongst journalists and the small number.
They're always either they're either praising each other or they're totally casting insults.
I mean, it's like nothing. So it's very hard to know how seriously to take some of that.
But she also she featured a couple of times and would be the Hurston's magazine, for sure.
And that was a magazine that got around. I mean, it definitely got all over the Ottoman Empire.
It got to Latin America. It probably got to parts of North America.
So she would have been read by some people.
I wish I knew more with more questions coming in from our remote audience, although some of them are what you've already dealt with.
And I'll read the names of the people who are asking the same question again wants to know how close were so as his ties to
her native Lebanon after she left and what kind of influence the state provided Egypt granted to Gillam says wonderful talk.
Marilyn definitely is. Zainab was this feminist in so many ways.
I'm wondering about her relations with rural women in Egypt and her dad working with other women within Egypt and neighbouring Arab countries.
I had one question also from Campbell Padgett, about respire, and his question was whether she did it for.
Financial exigency gets no money. Where did she have some higher motive?
In terms of Lebanon? That's a really fascinating question again, because she she never went back to general, as far as we know.
She did a couple of times. The family came to Cairo and she apparently saw them.
But there's a whole tragic sub layer to that family as well, which I'm not going to go into.
She was the this this editor I mentioned the adefisayo was.
Very interested in her and published a number of her works, and he published several biographies,
although these are part of the problematic, I mean, I don't know, it's like one of my associates but contradicts other sources.
But anyway, so he was very keen that people in Lebanon should know about her, and I think she did.
She did become a little bit of an icon there.
But as I said at the same time, he praised her for being, you know, she's writing and she's made her famous.
But she has such extreme views, you know, so so there's this kind of this kind of double edged thing.
And then also she I mentioned a second marriage and she actually this is also interesting.
She went to Damascus. She contracted a marriage by mail.
And they are online. Well, I think he's, you know, online dating.
He married without having met him.
A guy named Adeed knows me, who was a friend of mine, a writer, journalist and a civil servant, and she married him and went.
And so the contract was already made and she was still in Alexandria. He was there.
She went to join in. The marriage only lasted about two and a half years, and there are various things that are said about it.
One is that he forgot to mention a couple of details for her,
like the fact that he was married to three other women and that he expected her apparently to educate the daughters.
And then there are some other and also that she she went kind of crazy because they a maths person,
but he actually was a civil servant in a small village in the end.
For some of this time, she could not get Egyptian newspapers in the house, and she really hated that.
So she ended up demanding a divorce and going back to Cairo.
But she did have while she was injured. The reason I'm mentioning this is while she was in Damascus,
she apparently did have a sort of small salon that men came to, and as was true of the other salons,
some of the other salons we knew at the time she would sit behind a screen and whatever salon, so she had least was known to some people.
We don't know how widely, and Lebanese feminists have been very pleased to be able to claim her as a native daughter and to to see her as a forebear.
So she definitely there's I mean, when I say the legacy question, it is really tricky because early on I don't know.
But she's become now that she's become now more of a figure and people want to claim for and so forth.
So. Randy, thank you for coming.
Relations with rural women. This is really interesting, too, I think, more than relations with rural women.
She definitely I don't know how how much of a sort of personal contact this was.
But she wrote about urban working women a number of times and about the plight of servants.
And so again, unlike most of the other people were writing on gender at that time.
She really shows a a pretty deep sympathy, at least with working class.
And she also talks about rural women, and she does this over and over again to say,
you know, stop talking about women sitting at home because most women in Egypt don't.
They're out working. So she definitely had a sense of women of rural and urban working class women as an important, you know,
as a really significant group that she cared about, and she was very sympathetically about the spying question.
OK, I think I think it's both my sense of it is that she definitely does need money.
There's no question, in fact, when again, when her handler writes this fascinating letter to the palace, ostensibly to the positive,
although probably other people are reading it but saying, you know, I've got this woman that I really think can help us out.
You know, she'll need to be paid.
He says she, you know, she used to live with her brother, but now she's alone and she goes around women's houses trying to sell her books.
And I just, you know, this is amazing. So she really did. She definitely needed money.
But I think it was more than that. I think she really liked these reports of her are amazing, and she writes them with relish.
You feel like she loves this, you know?
And again, which is great. And she's always kind of showing with the way she writes.
She's showing whoever is going to read these things, how good she is at this spy games.
You know, she's almost like saying, you know, look at me, look how look, how well I'm doing this.
She is very good. I have to say she's very good at it, it seems.
So I think she really she really kind of.
Enjoyed it, I don't know if that's the right word, but she she found some kind of satisfaction in it.
She also in this she went over and above what the handler, at least as far as we know, told her.
I mean, he would not. I don't think he would have told her as a woman to go and go and visit male journalists.
But she did. So we have a number of times where she's reporting, and it's fascinating.
She reports on a conversation she has with procedure that she goes to the office of el-Banna and she has.
This amazing conversation was received about the British.
Another time she goes and she talks with one of the editors and whether it's the person or not.
Not sure, but it probably is. And so she was really quite fearless.
She wanted to be out there. She was also a great supporter of most of the candidates for the important nationalist leader.
And in fact, she was supposed to declaim a poem on behalf of the women of Egypt at his 40 day, 40 day celebration commemoration.
After his funeral, that funeral got short circuited because there were just there was such a question, people they apparently couldn't keep it going.
So I think she never actually stood up and claimed it. But her column was printed along with all these poems by men.
So she really, I mean, I think she really felt quite quite.
She very much wanted to be out there in the world to do these things.
And, you know, once she was older, she could she could get away with it.
And she did. But the question is, did she actually have any kind of did she feel like, you know, was this an act of loyalty to the party?
I mean, did she have political reasons for doing this?
I just don't know, because it's sort of contradictory because one of the people she's spying on is one, for instance,
is one of Canada's most trusted deputies, and she's basically partly responsible, probably for sending him to jail.
And he was also a great supporter of women's rights.
So it's very, very hard to know what know what are the political investments here are that is that is a conundrum.
I want to do some more writing and thinking about those spy reports.
I mean, I do have a chapter part of a chapter on them, but I think they deserve more attention.
OK. So thank you for a great job, great ones on top of the other great works.
And let's go celebrate the reception. Thank you.
Thank you.