1 00:00:05,550 --> 00:00:13,170 Good evening, everyone, but those of you who are here virtually and those of you who are here in the actual world. 2 00:00:13,170 --> 00:00:18,730 My name's Walter Andrews. I'm chairing tonight's seminar and it is a great pleasure. 3 00:00:18,730 --> 00:00:21,450 The speaker is Marilyn Booth. 4 00:00:21,450 --> 00:00:31,650 I've known since forever and she is the husband, Abdullah outSo, professor for the study of contemporary Arab world title. 5 00:00:31,650 --> 00:00:36,000 She has extremely broad research interests. I'll mention just a few of them. 6 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:42,960 She's written on early feminism and national nationalist Islamist discourses in Arabic speaking world, 7 00:00:42,960 --> 00:00:46,770 autobiography biography in Arabism and Francophone, 8 00:00:46,770 --> 00:00:55,080 Middle East and North Africa, literature and politics of Arab Arabic quilts and the history of Arabic periodicals, 9 00:00:55,080 --> 00:00:59,430 particularly satirical press and the women's press is just a few. 10 00:00:59,430 --> 00:01:06,840 Marilyn often describes herself more as a historian who works on literature than as the literary scholar, but really, 11 00:01:06,840 --> 00:01:16,530 she's just an exemplary scholar in terms of the interdisciplinary scope of her research and publishing in a literary and historical scholarship. 12 00:01:16,530 --> 00:01:21,000 She also does literary translation amongst her literary translations. 13 00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:26,340 I think she has at least a dozen of them to 18. 14 00:01:26,340 --> 00:01:41,610 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, 15 00:01:41,610 --> 00:01:46,530 which is one of the major literary prises in the world which is given to a 16 00:01:46,530 --> 00:01:51,670 work of fiction translated into English and awarded equally to the translator. 17 00:01:51,670 --> 00:01:57,900 The author just published too many works linked to tonight's lecture to mention all of them. 18 00:01:57,900 --> 00:02:02,460 I can't even begin to summarise the articles, book chapters and edited volumes. 19 00:02:02,460 --> 00:02:06,870 There are two monographs which is published since 2008, and I will mention. 20 00:02:06,870 --> 00:02:17,550 One is classes of ladies appointment spaces writing feminist history through biography in Egypt, and the other is men who like to be multiply. 21 00:02:17,550 --> 00:02:27,980 Biography, gender, politics and agents. Tonight's lecture builds both works and is a book launch. 22 00:02:27,980 --> 00:02:30,680 She's been working on this book for a very long time. 23 00:02:30,680 --> 00:02:38,150 It's unfortunate for those of you who are here virtually because there is going to actually be drinks after the lecture. 24 00:02:38,150 --> 00:02:44,390 Virtual drinks, I guess this is the intellectual biography of early Arabic, 25 00:02:44,390 --> 00:02:53,870 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, 26 00:02:53,870 --> 00:03:00,640 Egypt in the context of radical debates on gender, modernity and the good society. 27 00:03:00,640 --> 00:03:09,920 The time of lecture is the same as the book the career and communities of Santaco as feminist thinking and the This Egypt. 28 00:03:09,920 --> 00:03:15,780 It's an honour to introduce someone who really is a giant in our field and in our community. 29 00:03:15,780 --> 00:03:27,340 And so I gave you this renowned blue. Thank you very much, Walter, for that extremely generous introduction. 30 00:03:27,340 --> 00:03:32,390 It's a pleasure to be here. I feel like I'm a family. That's not only because of their Walter. 31 00:03:32,390 --> 00:03:42,760 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, 32 00:03:42,760 --> 00:03:49,060 and I'm delighted that this is the first in-person lecture that we've been able to have. 33 00:03:49,060 --> 00:03:59,890 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. 34 00:03:59,890 --> 00:04:06,540 A furious reaction erupted in the Egyptian press in response to the Arabic translation. 35 00:04:06,540 --> 00:04:11,610 French Foreign Minister Gabriele Panopto titled Simply This Slam, 36 00:04:11,610 --> 00:04:16,170 the French original was aimed at a French audience and published in a Paris magazine. 37 00:04:16,170 --> 00:04:24,660 It's quite an odd feeling for a Dutch final diatribe, with worries about France's imperial future in Africa for readers in Egypt. 38 00:04:24,660 --> 00:04:34,200 It represented the worst of European imperialist Orientalism. Famously, Egypt's Mufti Mohammed Abdu responded immediately and eloquently. 39 00:04:34,200 --> 00:04:40,260 Many lesser known figures also responded One intervention has gone unnoticed was an article by 40 00:04:40,260 --> 00:04:48,290 Cinepolis that appeared in the national newspapers and the web on the 28th of April 19 hundreds. 41 00:04:48,290 --> 00:04:55,320 And I just want to say before going on all the quotations in this talk or translation my translations from the Arabic. 42 00:04:55,320 --> 00:05:00,480 So if you have any questions about them, feel free to ask. Also, I'm not going to read the whole thing. 43 00:05:00,480 --> 00:05:05,940 I'm just it's up there for you to get a taste, but I'll read parts of these quotations. 44 00:05:05,940 --> 00:05:11,040 So she says when it appeared on that particular day, we were at a women's gathering. 45 00:05:11,040 --> 00:05:16,550 One of the ladies picked it up and began to read it out loud as we listened until we got to the point. 46 00:05:16,550 --> 00:05:26,010 60ml was quoted, excluding his comments on the Tomb of the Prophet and his accusations against the religion itself. 47 00:05:26,010 --> 00:05:29,070 When we heard this of operating, the sense of pride, 48 00:05:29,070 --> 00:05:36,270 honour and self-respect was erupting so strongly in the latest polls that we wish to sit inside a war in which the players, 49 00:05:36,270 --> 00:05:44,460 after some trenchant comments on the political and moral bankruptcy of the local male ruling with the author returns to the site of investigation. 50 00:05:44,460 --> 00:05:55,300 The women's meeting? Likely. She said someone can come from the hands of women to resolve such a thorny problem, 51 00:05:55,300 --> 00:06:04,650 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. 52 00:06:04,650 --> 00:06:11,700 I said, yes, we are inside cages and we're very few at present, but a rainstorm starts with a single drop. 53 00:06:11,700 --> 00:06:14,730 The article went on to hear women's collective work. 54 00:06:14,730 --> 00:06:21,660 The women became determined to raise their sons and daughters on religious principles and national local manufacturers, 55 00:06:21,660 --> 00:06:30,420 etc. The assemblage of women determined that women imitating the Europeans as much as possible and none would deal with Europe's merchants. 56 00:06:30,420 --> 00:06:35,910 They would do business only with Muslim merchants. They would implant this virtue in the hearts of their daughters. 57 00:06:35,910 --> 00:06:42,490 And thus, before a quarter-century passed with no trace of European farmers, will be found in east. 58 00:06:42,490 --> 00:06:49,090 Now, this was years before the famous call for a boycott by post-war nationalist women in Egypt. 59 00:06:49,090 --> 00:06:54,860 So it's and it's not something that I've ever heard, seen, referred to note the language. 60 00:06:54,860 --> 00:07:03,370 What was probably a gathering of friends in a home takes on political heft and a split making a formal declaration of a boycott. 61 00:07:03,370 --> 00:07:10,480 It's emblematic of this author's bold style, so we do not know whether a boycott was actually attempted. 62 00:07:10,480 --> 00:07:18,190 My book addresses the career of a writer whose views are strikingly distinct amongst the Arab leaders of her era. 63 00:07:18,190 --> 00:07:26,330 I consider xenophobic writings and other actions within the context of gender as a key axis of the 19th century, 64 00:07:26,330 --> 00:07:31,940 Arab acknowledged then as later as the master. 65 00:07:31,940 --> 00:07:35,930 And also with reference to emerging anti-colonial sources, 66 00:07:35,930 --> 00:07:43,190 the book traces one individual's tenacious engagement with contentious issues while embedding an individual's body of 67 00:07:43,190 --> 00:07:51,470 work within the communities of discourse of personal connexion and political negotiation in which it's often moved, 68 00:07:51,470 --> 00:07:58,870 spoke at times to inspire. What I want to do is talk a little bit about her life history, 69 00:07:58,870 --> 00:08:05,740 which is unusual and move from that into the whole problem of sources when one is trying to write a biography. 70 00:08:05,740 --> 00:08:11,170 I then want to talk about some key words which are part of my title book title. 71 00:08:11,170 --> 00:08:15,790 And to use that as a way to talk about what she wrote, focussing on her essays. 72 00:08:15,790 --> 00:08:20,780 I'd love to talk about the end of her life. It's absolutely fascinating. 73 00:08:20,780 --> 00:08:25,450 It's also very problematic in a different way for biography, but I may not have time. 74 00:08:25,450 --> 00:08:31,130 So you're very welcome to ask the questions and answers if you're interested. 75 00:08:31,130 --> 00:08:38,360 So I now want to put up another quotation from a letter that was sent to the Beirut newspaper, The Standard, 76 00:08:38,360 --> 00:08:49,190 in March 1892, eight years before she was writing, and the rest of St. Francis to the director of the Senate, shall. 77 00:08:49,190 --> 00:08:55,130 I cannot express my gratitude for your hard work commitment and standing visible in society. 78 00:08:55,130 --> 00:08:58,910 Speaking for my sisters, women of the East, I thank you for your efforts, 79 00:08:58,910 --> 00:09:04,700 and I think women of the West are striving towards excellence, surpassing the men in many areas. 80 00:09:04,700 --> 00:09:11,900 God willing, we'll get to the same place amongst countless writings and every branch of knowledge, always concerning our women. 81 00:09:11,900 --> 00:09:21,790 A few utterances by unknown women or bits of poetry secluded in remote squares in the ancient books that no one is. 82 00:09:21,790 --> 00:09:29,410 Vitally concerned, I began considering what it would take to create a force that would recognise and eliminate the excellence of women. 83 00:09:29,410 --> 00:09:38,500 I found no solution but to propose and play others like the streets, which is designed to protect to action, including everyone. 84 00:09:38,500 --> 00:09:43,060 But since this is the age of knowledge, an important era in women's education, 85 00:09:43,060 --> 00:09:48,640 I wanted to join the ground with all the life histories I could get through the Senate. 86 00:09:48,640 --> 00:09:55,120 I call on my sisters who wish to have their life histories and my book to send them to me or my brother. 87 00:09:55,120 --> 00:10:00,010 Muhammad Ali is a lawyer in civil. 88 00:10:00,010 --> 00:10:08,650 The book she speaks of was a massive biographical dictionary of world women in Arabic, which saw the light of day in 1895. 89 00:10:08,650 --> 00:10:12,940 My previous monograph, The One That Walter mentioned there, 90 00:10:12,940 --> 00:10:24,070 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. 91 00:10:24,070 --> 00:10:28,030 Her letter was a call for contributions and an app for her project, 92 00:10:28,030 --> 00:10:32,680 but it can also be seen as an implicit argument for women's writing autobiographically, 93 00:10:32,680 --> 00:10:41,920 highlighting their knowledge in an era when elite women's names were most often not made public, let alone their lives under understated. 94 00:10:41,920 --> 00:10:49,750 This may have been, but the sentence was still a provocative suggestion about women as public figures with his 95 00:10:49,750 --> 00:10:55,690 own assumption of her role in public life is the reason that I've long been fascinated by it. 96 00:10:55,690 --> 00:11:04,450 But the letter also conjures up a paradox, as his own biography does not appear in the volume or really else. 97 00:11:04,450 --> 00:11:11,020 In fact, we know very little that is certain about his life, and there are competing narratives. 98 00:11:11,020 --> 00:11:16,240 This biographical elusiveness from a woman who spent so much time compiling biographies 99 00:11:16,240 --> 00:11:23,330 of other others has certainly been a shaping factor in the way that I written this book. 100 00:11:23,330 --> 00:11:28,580 Her life was starkly different to those the lives of most of the small group of 101 00:11:28,580 --> 00:11:35,690 published a rather than female writers in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s. 102 00:11:35,690 --> 00:11:36,230 First, 103 00:11:36,230 --> 00:11:47,450 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. 104 00:11:47,450 --> 00:11:54,440 But it was also a community long known research and literary prowess as a she in her adult life in Egypt, 105 00:11:54,440 --> 00:12:03,570 the West was an absolutely tiny religious minority, and it isn't surprising that her she background is barely visible in the writings. 106 00:12:03,570 --> 00:12:11,570 Second, the West did not have a wealthy or learnt first family behind her, though she and her brother nearly had some cultural access. 107 00:12:11,570 --> 00:12:19,100 As a young girl, she became attached to the local feudal rulers household, and she got her first literary training from the same year. 108 00:12:19,100 --> 00:12:22,280 But top prospects ultimate into last night. 109 00:12:22,280 --> 00:12:30,770 This is another unusual feature to be literary that are rarely changed by a female poet in the south of Lebanon. 110 00:12:30,770 --> 00:12:35,810 It's not clear when, how or why the West emigrated from Lebanon to Egypt. 111 00:12:35,810 --> 00:12:41,960 There seems to have been a disastrous early marriage to an employee of the year and the subsequent divorce. 112 00:12:41,960 --> 00:12:47,300 Some sources claim that she married an Egyptian military man, but there's no evidence for that. 113 00:12:47,300 --> 00:12:55,310 And I suspect these catching actually female immigrating to the south of Lebanon to urban Egypt unless it involves a husband, 114 00:12:55,310 --> 00:13:04,200 she may have emigrated with her brother in Cairo. She probably lived with him, and I have something of his career. 115 00:13:04,200 --> 00:13:10,720 She began her published career with essays in major Arabic newspapers and came to 116 00:13:10,720 --> 00:13:15,640 the attention of another newspaper editor and began publishing in his journal. 117 00:13:15,640 --> 00:13:17,140 These are rather fascinating, 118 00:13:17,140 --> 00:13:25,870 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. 119 00:13:25,870 --> 00:13:32,060 Published many of her essays in this newspaper, and I asked why she did publish there. 120 00:13:32,060 --> 00:13:35,830 And I scrutinised the news, gender politics as I do that. 121 00:13:35,830 --> 00:13:43,480 But the more prominent newspapers that Anderson, apparently, which was also published, 122 00:13:43,480 --> 00:13:52,350 I also follow her work for the first Arabic magazine for women produced by women, which I see as a collective project. 123 00:13:52,350 --> 00:13:56,920 Boaz went on to publish her biographical dictionary many newspaper essays, 124 00:13:56,920 --> 00:14:03,670 two novels and a play well known at least to a very small community of newspaper and book readers. 125 00:14:03,670 --> 00:14:12,370 When she died in 1914, the obituary in the background was unusually long for a female, but it included nothing about her life trajectory, 126 00:14:12,370 --> 00:14:21,010 including her quite fascinating later life, which included another marriage and divorce and a stint to of the city's spy network. 127 00:14:21,010 --> 00:14:29,100 After her death, her voice seemed to disappear in print, except for publications with entries biographical fiction. 128 00:14:29,100 --> 00:14:32,520 So she's a fascinating, intriguing figure. 129 00:14:32,520 --> 00:14:41,460 Biographically Hickok is not a traditional biography because so much is unknown, so I do do a lot of sleuthing and speculation. 130 00:14:41,460 --> 00:14:48,570 In fact, the conflicting narratives that we have immediately raised a frustrating question When was she born? 131 00:14:48,570 --> 00:14:54,420 The dates usually given are 1846 and 1860, and those are a generations apart. 132 00:14:54,420 --> 00:14:59,940 They would mean different things, but her relationships as a child and as an adult, for example, 133 00:14:59,940 --> 00:15:09,690 her mentor Fatima, was born in 1840, where they near contemporaries were 20 years apart in age difference. 134 00:15:09,690 --> 00:15:17,880 To make things more interesting, I suspect that later in life, she rewrote her own biography, so it was never attributed to her. 135 00:15:17,880 --> 00:15:23,400 A brief biographical notice surfaced in two texts in 1995 and 1996. 136 00:15:23,400 --> 00:15:29,370 I'm not going to read it, but just to say this CV like narrative president born in 1860, 137 00:15:29,370 --> 00:15:36,510 immigrating to Alexandria as a child with his family being educated by chance and turning into a writer. 138 00:15:36,510 --> 00:15:47,550 Nothing about marriages, divorces, slightly problematic journeys, let alone spike with all of this uncertainty. 139 00:15:47,550 --> 00:15:52,950 What does one do? Partly because of the West, but also because this is the way it works. 140 00:15:52,950 --> 00:16:01,110 I try to imagine and to read her within various communities of discourse while not ignoring the life. 141 00:16:01,110 --> 00:16:08,010 This brings us to the terms I use in the book's title, which signal the French. 142 00:16:08,010 --> 00:16:14,310 So I'm going to start with feminist thinking and then move into community, and I may or may not have time to get. 143 00:16:14,310 --> 00:16:20,400 What feminism means in a 19th century context anywhere in the world is the question in this exercise. 144 00:16:20,400 --> 00:16:25,380 Many scholars like feminism itself, the answers are varied and multifaceted. 145 00:16:25,380 --> 00:16:32,850 Drawing on alternative terminologies sensitive to the many ways women and men have sought to think about gender differentiation, 146 00:16:32,850 --> 00:16:39,120 its sources and its effects. Some historians avoid using the term prior to the 20th century, 147 00:16:39,120 --> 00:16:46,350 since feminism only emerged in the context of French activism in the late 19th century as a term. 148 00:16:46,350 --> 00:16:51,330 Others point to the multiple meanings the label has for those who did adopt it. 149 00:16:51,330 --> 00:16:57,540 Scholars of European colonialism emphasised the imperial legacies to which feminism has been put. 150 00:16:57,540 --> 00:17:07,170 But historians of more American humanism estimate the exclusionary, racist outlooks of many white feminists, individuals and groups. 151 00:17:07,170 --> 00:17:11,520 There's no single way to think feminism for any context, 152 00:17:11,520 --> 00:17:17,580 scholarship on Egypt in this period emphasises women's contributions to a vigorous public debate and 153 00:17:17,580 --> 00:17:24,210 to activity underpinning the emergence of the feminist movement in writing and publishing education, 154 00:17:24,210 --> 00:17:27,810 benevolence and politics. 155 00:17:27,810 --> 00:17:38,940 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, 156 00:17:38,940 --> 00:17:44,730 women and men were already deeply engaged in the question of gender norms and gender defined rights. 157 00:17:44,730 --> 00:17:50,010 Studies also highlight the importance of the women's question to the formation of Egyptian anti-colonial 158 00:17:50,010 --> 00:17:56,820 nationalism and associated women's discourses that critically assessed zero American societies. 159 00:17:56,820 --> 00:18:03,750 Reformers sought legal and attitudinal changes to family structure as essential to modernity. 160 00:18:03,750 --> 00:18:12,900 They did this partly through an emerging discourse of companionate marriage, which was meant to encourage notions of gender and integrate women, 161 00:18:12,900 --> 00:18:19,350 embraced nationalist projects, but not always on the terms articulated by masculine leaderships. 162 00:18:19,350 --> 00:18:28,380 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, 163 00:18:28,380 --> 00:18:34,700 women's agendas were not only about the nation, nor were women in accord with each other. 164 00:18:34,700 --> 00:18:38,750 Confronting the discursive formation I study, 165 00:18:38,750 --> 00:18:46,410 I find it useful to think feminist as an analytic concept rather than as a label that captures what I think. 166 00:18:46,410 --> 00:18:56,240 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. 167 00:18:56,240 --> 00:19:05,150 This is not to suppress or denigrate alternative activism or to deny that their work changed women's and men's lives beneficially. 168 00:19:05,150 --> 00:19:09,620 But we can only understand the extent and the limits of change if we appreciate the 169 00:19:09,620 --> 00:19:16,340 range of use in one discursive context for Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s. 170 00:19:16,340 --> 00:19:26,030 Such distinctions have remained, I believe, under addressing symptoms of structural gender decline in equality in a hierarchical system. 171 00:19:26,030 --> 00:19:34,400 Feminist thinking in the way that I use it goes beyond the symptomatic to recognise and challenge underlying attitudes or these systems, 172 00:19:34,400 --> 00:19:40,050 whether defined as patriarchal male dominance or nastiness. 173 00:19:40,050 --> 00:19:46,380 And also to unpack social sexual structures that produce these sort of manifestations, 174 00:19:46,380 --> 00:19:53,460 feminist thinking in this sense is distinguished from gender reform, which seeks to improve conditions for girls and women. 175 00:19:53,460 --> 00:19:56,610 But without critique of the underlying system, 176 00:19:56,610 --> 00:20:03,690 reformers might regard such changes as necessary to modernise or even perpetuate the patriarchal system, 177 00:20:03,690 --> 00:20:07,230 leaving its structure and its assumptions in place. 178 00:20:07,230 --> 00:20:14,220 These assumptions include the notion of natural gender, the centrality of paternity and property transfer, 179 00:20:14,220 --> 00:20:21,180 the patrolling and attempted management of women's sexuality through formulations of honour to ensure paternity, 180 00:20:21,180 --> 00:20:26,070 but also to discipline females and to absolve males. 181 00:20:26,070 --> 00:20:28,560 It also is this assumption that family members, 182 00:20:28,560 --> 00:20:37,710 under the caption of the father the rejection of women's story as formal community leaders and their exclusion from political decision-making, 183 00:20:37,710 --> 00:20:42,690 buttressing the notion of the male head of household as political subject. 184 00:20:42,690 --> 00:20:51,330 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, 185 00:20:51,330 --> 00:20:55,710 their notions of learnt domesticity and companionate marriage ambitions. 186 00:20:55,710 --> 00:20:58,920 No changes in structures of authority. 187 00:20:58,920 --> 00:21:06,120 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. 188 00:21:06,120 --> 00:21:10,020 It's a politics grounded in an analysis of power in society. 189 00:21:10,020 --> 00:21:19,290 The Palestine gender, as a fundamental human best with the choice system, is a structure of hierarchy wherein the female is the subordinated term. 190 00:21:19,290 --> 00:21:23,880 It is also a recognition that the most basic privilege of being classified 191 00:21:23,880 --> 00:21:30,240 male is the right to define as low as to maintain that relationship of power. 192 00:21:30,240 --> 00:21:36,600 In other words, to declare what a woman is in of it, as in other languages. 193 00:21:36,600 --> 00:21:43,920 The women question was a rubric under which multiple issues that were also very much about men were discussed. 194 00:21:43,920 --> 00:21:50,520 The explicit focus was usually unanimous and the notion of the male person as consent. 195 00:21:50,520 --> 00:21:59,040 Humanity unmarked by gender was one of the mechanisms by which this definition 40 was and is maintained. 196 00:21:59,040 --> 00:22:06,480 So feminist thinking entails not only the display of patriarchy as a system that privileges male authority, 197 00:22:06,480 --> 00:22:11,940 but recognition as the disciplinary means to maintain compliance through persuasion, 198 00:22:11,940 --> 00:22:19,170 psychological pressure and resort to tradition, to legal structures, to force acts and the threat of violence. 199 00:22:19,170 --> 00:22:27,300 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, 200 00:22:27,300 --> 00:22:33,750 but I think that there's been insufficient attention to the range of views within the early Arabism debates or gender, 201 00:22:33,750 --> 00:22:41,910 and I think it's important to try to understand a range of views and what. 202 00:22:41,910 --> 00:22:50,070 Singapore is wrote on the same topics as did others, the necessity for girls education, shortcomings in the marital regime, 203 00:22:50,070 --> 00:22:55,260 the durability of beliefs harmful to personal health and men's bad behaviours, 204 00:22:55,260 --> 00:23:00,900 as well as their cryptocurrencies, she wrote on issues of social justice and women's work. 205 00:23:00,900 --> 00:23:07,320 And I have just these are the middle. I have chapters in my book on each of these issues, 206 00:23:07,320 --> 00:23:13,400 and I try very hard to make my chapters stand alone chapters so that nobody has to read the whole book. 207 00:23:13,400 --> 00:23:19,590 I got a very big book, but unlike most, is so, 208 00:23:19,590 --> 00:23:28,590 as his writings comprised a critique of the prevailing understandings of sex gender as defining individuals social possibilities. 209 00:23:28,590 --> 00:23:39,720 And her essay argued that keeping the relationship in place required and encouraged men's ongoing tactics of psychological and physical subversion. 210 00:23:39,720 --> 00:23:48,990 In one of her early, earliest published essays, I Translate the title as Phyllis does not arise from material plenitude for posterity. 211 00:23:48,990 --> 00:23:52,950 But we ask again the strong characterisations of married women's lives. 212 00:23:52,950 --> 00:24:01,770 She did such a reprise and reject arguments made by those who oppose changes in marriage practises, girls education and female mobility. 213 00:24:01,770 --> 00:24:08,160 The standard version if girls were educated, they would become just dissatisfied with their accepted. 214 00:24:08,160 --> 00:24:11,820 What might they be too uppity to do housework, 215 00:24:11,820 --> 00:24:19,410 too occupied with purchasing luxury goods and initiating social engagements to be thrifty wives and mothers? 216 00:24:19,410 --> 00:24:29,190 So as Caustically rewrote that argument in order to demolish it with her provocative gloss, she suggested that the roots of this discontent. 217 00:24:29,190 --> 00:24:34,350 Thus, the reasons for denying females in education were something else. 218 00:24:34,350 --> 00:24:41,160 So she sets it up here. And then she says the husband's argument is that if women learnt the true nature of society, 219 00:24:41,160 --> 00:24:46,050 the circumstances of various classes of people and the way things are at present, 220 00:24:46,050 --> 00:24:53,370 the women would become the husbands assert malcontent with their lives where they would detest the rule of their despotic husbands 221 00:24:53,370 --> 00:25:01,560 and the knowledge and learning to lead them to break the right of obedience and emerge from the music bondage to the arena, 222 00:25:01,560 --> 00:25:09,300 of course, was not what the husbands were saying. But it's her unpacking of the argument that she used hyperbole. 223 00:25:09,300 --> 00:25:15,360 Tactically, her language mocked the spirit scare discourse of those opposing girls education. 224 00:25:15,360 --> 00:25:21,420 At the same time, the text created a disconnect between these opponent's views that free up 225 00:25:21,420 --> 00:25:27,360 freedom as a euphemism for young woman's alleged sexual spatial improprieties, 226 00:25:27,360 --> 00:25:36,620 freedom as licentiousness and her own understanding of freedom as a space of self-realisation and necessary world. 227 00:25:36,620 --> 00:25:40,950 Felicity, which she talks about later in the same essay, 228 00:25:40,950 --> 00:25:46,830 saying it means the ability to exercise one's intelligence for the good itself, family and society. 229 00:25:46,830 --> 00:25:53,450 I argue in the book that this understanding of what we do is also fundamental to reflection. 230 00:25:53,450 --> 00:26:00,170 Perhaps this is hyperbole was not hyperbolic at all through an accumulating lexicon of domination and 231 00:26:00,170 --> 00:26:06,380 perverse subordination for language suggested what it is that women would babies through education, 232 00:26:06,380 --> 00:26:12,800 not an investment in consumption or disdain for domestic work reasons with the despotism 233 00:26:12,800 --> 00:26:18,870 practised against gay marriage and the confidence to contest its outcomes going further. 234 00:26:18,870 --> 00:26:27,830 So as its ratings suggest, she recognises the concept of a natural division of labour based on constricting women's work to family maintenance, 235 00:26:27,830 --> 00:26:37,820 coupled with a patriarchal structure of authority, would not be an adequate basis for social relations founded on mutual recognition and consent. 236 00:26:37,820 --> 00:26:42,050 Again, I think this distinguishes her from those who are interested in change on the 237 00:26:42,050 --> 00:26:47,000 ground did not see these structures as by definition subversive to women, 238 00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:49,730 were detrimental to human relations. 239 00:26:49,730 --> 00:26:59,150 Many of the interlocutors espoused a different or separate but equal approach to women's work is just as valuable as men's, 240 00:26:59,150 --> 00:27:05,360 and it required and manifested equivalent mental and physical capabilities, but it was different from work. 241 00:27:05,360 --> 00:27:07,930 This was the substance of the debate in print, 242 00:27:07,930 --> 00:27:16,790 as Lebanese writer kind of learnt so fiercely admonish women not to think about stepping over the threshold and out of domestic work, 243 00:27:16,790 --> 00:27:27,380 and criticise British suffragists for doing so that they supported the suffragists as exerting themselves for their own futures and their nations. 244 00:27:27,380 --> 00:27:34,580 And she criticised women who didn't support them implicitly, including running as lazy. 245 00:27:34,580 --> 00:27:44,480 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. 246 00:27:44,480 --> 00:27:52,130 Snow Edition with separate spheres is a prescriptive concept only unevenly and partially descriptive. 247 00:27:52,130 --> 00:28:01,190 But we reminded Simone that many women in Egypt and Europe had long worked outside the home to support themselves and their families. 248 00:28:01,190 --> 00:28:08,420 The very tradition public private is a fairly recent concept of European origins rooted in the labour and spatial 249 00:28:08,420 --> 00:28:14,270 transformations of the Industrial Revolution and capitalist organisation with relations with production, 250 00:28:14,270 --> 00:28:19,730 which benefited from maintaining a notion of male breadwinner with women's unmatched work in 251 00:28:19,730 --> 00:28:25,430 providing assistance support that Egypt in the Ottoman Empire were entangled in an uneven, 252 00:28:25,430 --> 00:28:30,770 European led global capitalist nexus by the late 19th century before. 253 00:28:30,770 --> 00:28:35,930 That may have encouraged the grafting on this notion of gender labour division 254 00:28:35,930 --> 00:28:42,200 to existing spatial social codes that were already well entrenched locally. 255 00:28:42,200 --> 00:28:47,600 But so, as is writing, offers a reminder that this was not contested. 256 00:28:47,600 --> 00:28:53,330 Her final submission in the debate with Romney is perhaps a statement of a non-essentials 257 00:28:53,330 --> 00:28:57,770 stance that also rejected a static state historical view of gender roles. 258 00:28:57,770 --> 00:29:04,380 And I'm sorry again, I wish I had time to read all of these. 259 00:29:04,380 --> 00:29:13,140 So as did not contest the ongoing reality of women's and men's lives as different, differently cited physically and in social roles. 260 00:29:13,140 --> 00:29:17,820 But she rejected notions of hierarchical, different sanctions by nature. 261 00:29:17,820 --> 00:29:22,800 She did not celebrate women's special qualities or argue that they were different people, 262 00:29:22,800 --> 00:29:29,130 though she did insist that women's reproductive work be respected and valued as labour. 263 00:29:29,130 --> 00:29:33,900 She insisted that there was no realm of work that women as a category did not form, 264 00:29:33,900 --> 00:29:40,770 even as she noted that in the here and now elite Muslim women's accustomed spatial social practises did, 265 00:29:40,770 --> 00:29:49,500 in a practical sense, bar certain kinds of work. Thus, Phyllis acknowledged the ongoing social consequences of sexual difference. 266 00:29:49,500 --> 00:29:55,530 Concepts that made in sustainable had emerged in the context of Western Europeans, 267 00:29:55,530 --> 00:30:05,250 specifically a doctrine of abstract individualism leading in terms of sex in relation to a constitutive paradox. 268 00:30:05,250 --> 00:30:14,550 The abstract individual as basis of the political self was qualified in the human world politics through categorical exclusions, 269 00:30:14,550 --> 00:30:19,170 including out of females from the revolutionary political self-image of the French 270 00:30:19,170 --> 00:30:24,840 Revolution or from the liberal white sphere and such intimate of British common law. 271 00:30:24,840 --> 00:30:35,490 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. 272 00:30:35,490 --> 00:30:44,070 One might argue, on the other hand, that those who based their outlooks in an Islamic ethical field did not face this dilemma. 273 00:30:44,070 --> 00:30:47,010 Rather than an abstract disembodied subject, 274 00:30:47,010 --> 00:30:55,890 one might supermodel in the body and gendered relievers equally responsible before God, as addressed in her arms. 275 00:30:55,890 --> 00:31:03,810 But whereas Islamic positioning undergirded the argument for a non patriarchal non-essentials viewpoint on gender, 276 00:31:03,810 --> 00:31:09,600 invoking the Sharia as a universal moral code for human rights. 277 00:31:09,600 --> 00:31:14,670 At the same time, and crucially, like her male reformist peers, 278 00:31:14,670 --> 00:31:21,000 women such as the argue that law and other social institutions formulated from time to 279 00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:27,570 a rereading of the foundational texts of Islamic practise were not divinely ordained, 280 00:31:27,570 --> 00:31:37,410 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. 281 00:31:37,410 --> 00:31:42,840 Debates in Arabic and the politics of gender were entangled with an coterminous group. 282 00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:50,220 It's important to keep this in mind. Debates are occurring literally across the world, women and men in Egypt. 283 00:31:50,220 --> 00:32:01,390 We're aware of what was going on elsewhere of feminist and other gender activists, including anti-feminist arguments and initiatives in many places. 284 00:32:01,390 --> 00:32:09,400 The arguments were part of what was just no simple borrowing, but rather savvy adaptations, a kind of lateral thinking. 285 00:32:09,400 --> 00:32:19,540 We can appreciate gender activism and within them feminism's as local police presences while remaining sensitive to particular trajectories, 286 00:32:19,540 --> 00:32:24,220 Lopez perceived your actions as part of a trans societal concern. 287 00:32:24,220 --> 00:32:33,940 But this does not mean she saw four interventions as derivative. It often seems to be assumed that Arab intellectuals borrowings from Western sources 288 00:32:33,940 --> 00:32:40,110 constituted new standards and that these new ideas supported more flexible gender, 289 00:32:40,110 --> 00:32:46,930 which the whole Westernisation thing while introducing modern notions of domesticity. 290 00:32:46,930 --> 00:32:50,860 But this is only part of the story. Reading the Arabic press, Leslie, 291 00:32:50,860 --> 00:32:56,410 it's evident that narrowly restricted often anti-feminist or even misogynist 292 00:32:56,410 --> 00:33:02,320 European pronouncements on gender were conceived and translated just as avidly. 293 00:33:02,320 --> 00:33:09,220 American pundits who were antisemitism cited European authorities in support of the socialist, 294 00:33:09,220 --> 00:33:18,190 nature driven views about the socialist organisation in an 1894 debate, which is the subject of one of our chapters. 295 00:33:18,190 --> 00:33:29,680 Physician aminos use biomedical distress developed in Europe to shore up a deeply conservative resistance to women's activism and even their speech. 296 00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:36,000 His misogynist outlook became more pronounced, with women challenging entrenched. 297 00:33:36,000 --> 00:33:46,520 It's also been assumed, although I think recent work changing this, that it was the West were Westernised Assyrian Christian immigrants such as. 298 00:33:46,520 --> 00:33:51,680 Who were the main conduits of these imported ideas? To the extent this is true, 299 00:33:51,680 --> 00:33:57,410 it's important to keep in mind that they all come true under Afghan figures whose writings Panopto 300 00:33:57,410 --> 00:34:04,340 highly patriarchal views of gender congenial to one prevalent indigenous patriarchal outlooks, 301 00:34:04,340 --> 00:34:14,270 often based as western Europeans on readings of the Bible, Egyptian courts and Muslims also pervade the range of European views. 302 00:34:14,270 --> 00:34:23,390 But it's important to remember that identity categories are not very useful in identifying individual stances on the meanings of gender. 303 00:34:23,390 --> 00:34:28,970 Although an individual's background training and really flexible Typekit varies. 304 00:34:28,970 --> 00:34:36,360 They used. So talking a little bit, moving a little bit to the question of community, 305 00:34:36,360 --> 00:34:41,490 placing feminism within the broader field of the women question or more accurately, 306 00:34:41,490 --> 00:34:49,860 the gender question we see the founders did right on the same issues that others did, but with different emphasis on girls education. 307 00:34:49,860 --> 00:34:57,190 She emphasised non gendered aspirations for the good life, which, in her view, the educated as they seem. 308 00:34:57,190 --> 00:35:03,180 She emphasised education as a means to no one's rights. That's just one example. 309 00:35:03,180 --> 00:35:09,540 She moved between incisive analysis of attitudes and calls for practical action. 310 00:35:09,540 --> 00:35:18,000 The latter might get women to work together performative me if it's suggests they were already working together, as in the 1990s. 311 00:35:18,000 --> 00:35:26,150 It's no response for rhetoric and choices. Then you sometimes term female leadership, sometimes a non gendered one in late, 312 00:35:26,150 --> 00:35:31,530 as she addressed the women of Egypt as a category in need of self-examination. 313 00:35:31,530 --> 00:35:36,900 She held different communities of gender, of state of origin belonging. 314 00:35:36,900 --> 00:35:43,050 Observing its work in public discourse means not only considering it genetically and generically, 315 00:35:43,050 --> 00:35:49,680 but also considering how she noted the arguments and to whom she was speaking for communities of distress. 316 00:35:49,680 --> 00:35:57,600 She was a forthright and often quite impolite debater and hence unusual for a woman. 317 00:35:57,600 --> 00:36:07,350 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. 318 00:36:07,350 --> 00:36:10,800 A methodology of deep listening, which is what I try to practise, 319 00:36:10,800 --> 00:36:16,350 requires attention to multiple and contentious discourses of key words such as progress, 320 00:36:16,350 --> 00:36:23,070 civilisation, rights, nature and still listening in on the rhetorical uses of terminology. 321 00:36:23,070 --> 00:36:30,630 The categories through which people argued is a reminder of its intelligence and creativity of any intellectual debate, 322 00:36:30,630 --> 00:36:39,900 even as one also registers its conditions of possibility. Attending to the inception of vocabularies obsessed with language, the uses of ambiguity, 323 00:36:39,900 --> 00:36:49,110 irony and silence means asking how writers situated themselves within certain conventions, only to push against visual mediums. 324 00:36:49,110 --> 00:36:54,450 Also, we have to ponder how language use might intersect with gender assignment. 325 00:36:54,450 --> 00:36:58,200 What risks did women take in using the language of aspect, 326 00:36:58,200 --> 00:37:05,310 or how could women into the language of jurisprudence an arena almost exclusively mask the centuries? 327 00:37:05,310 --> 00:37:11,580 These questions are just crucial because poets and other women have not only to engage the gender question, 328 00:37:11,580 --> 00:37:20,730 but also to enact the intellectual subjectivity that some, such as an employee, tried to deny to women. 329 00:37:20,730 --> 00:37:29,400 So my approach highlights her eclectic tactics, her reliance on the standings of social mobilisation articulated as Islamic for 330 00:37:29,400 --> 00:37:38,920 knowledgeable yet original these spaces and her proposals way of engaging interlocutors. 331 00:37:38,920 --> 00:37:44,410 In a long running debate with a minor official in the customs administration, 332 00:37:44,410 --> 00:37:50,350 Boaz addressed the exploitation of late versions of this comic strip and its sources 333 00:37:50,350 --> 00:37:56,200 as a patriarchal mechanism to keep women subordinate and unhealthy marriage foes use 334 00:37:56,200 --> 00:38:02,290 logic arguments of history and knowledge of Islamic sources to reject spouses understanding 335 00:38:02,290 --> 00:38:07,420 of gender as implacably cyberspace based on his reading of the creation story. 336 00:38:07,420 --> 00:38:14,770 The current diction and the team that was launched this text from the notion of Australia as a principle 337 00:38:14,770 --> 00:38:25,480 of gender hierarchy you began to seriously serially publish in the Magazine for Tots in early 1893. 338 00:38:25,480 --> 00:38:35,830 Very soon, so is under a pseudonym attacked him in the same journal, initiating what became a very complicated exchange in your newspaper. 339 00:38:35,830 --> 00:38:39,460 I read a piece by the distinguished writer Christian Affinity Fellowship, 340 00:38:39,460 --> 00:38:44,530 where he manifests as thoroughly partisanship through partisanship towards the sex, 341 00:38:44,530 --> 00:38:48,640 showing his prejudice towards our women, women, sex and other matters, 342 00:38:48,640 --> 00:38:54,280 the truth of which I will make clear to them as long as we preserves the etiquette of that exchange. 343 00:38:54,280 --> 00:39:05,650 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. 344 00:39:05,650 --> 00:39:15,190 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. 345 00:39:15,190 --> 00:39:25,090 Except your arrogance compelled you to depart from the requirements of proper ideas, and she calls him an escalating Oh Samus scholar. 346 00:39:25,090 --> 00:39:31,390 You are indeed the philosopher of the age and so forth. She uses this degree to great effect. 347 00:39:31,390 --> 00:39:39,430 The exchange, amongst other things, does show how visceral the debates over the meaning of Islamic sources to contemporary gender politics were, 348 00:39:39,430 --> 00:39:42,690 at least for some teenagers at that time. 349 00:39:42,690 --> 00:39:51,120 As the debate suggests, community adjustments are not always comfortable and supportive wherever feminism has existed, 350 00:39:51,120 --> 00:39:54,120 so has patriarchy that such throughout Europe, 351 00:39:54,120 --> 00:40:01,440 the 1890s for a decade of feminist activism and therefore acceptance that women have this scorn and hostility 352 00:40:01,440 --> 00:40:09,660 for airing their ambitions is not in any simple sense about women's accession to public political rights. 353 00:40:09,660 --> 00:40:17,730 Surveying 19th century gender rights in Britain, when Britain argues that quote, it was men's power in the private spirit, 354 00:40:17,730 --> 00:40:23,010 it was perceived to be threatened by proposals to give married women the right to vote to others. 355 00:40:23,010 --> 00:40:32,460 Not simply. It was indeed a sports masculine authority were perceived to be weakening the need to sort of move and felt more strongly. 356 00:40:32,460 --> 00:40:37,440 We see this in the 80s and 90s Arab media states as male editors who would 357 00:40:37,440 --> 00:40:42,180 declare themselves supportive to women's ambitions for more public engagement. 358 00:40:42,180 --> 00:40:46,460 We're sharply critical of women who chose to write about rights. 359 00:40:46,460 --> 00:40:52,970 The chair for girls education, and they're very explicit about it, we women, we need you to write about child here. 360 00:40:52,970 --> 00:41:04,190 Stop writing about race when in 1892 voters are running on the appropriateness of women's suffrage in an Egypt occupied by Britain? 361 00:41:04,190 --> 00:41:12,170 No one has political rights. In a sense, this gives more significance to the turbulence that has support for British suffrage and 362 00:41:12,170 --> 00:41:21,680 stood up for arguments not possibly have any foreseeable impact in the local level. 363 00:41:21,680 --> 00:41:29,660 The suggestion was too much for the liberal man who generously published women's votes in newspapers like Members of Parliament in Britain. 364 00:41:29,660 --> 00:41:39,740 These male some intellectuals were anxious to maintain masculine authority in the family by defining a clear sexual division of labour, 365 00:41:39,740 --> 00:41:43,250 including what women were allowed to write about. 366 00:41:43,250 --> 00:41:51,350 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. 367 00:41:51,350 --> 00:41:55,830 And first, they were the ones who defined what they meant by women's rights. 368 00:41:55,830 --> 00:42:06,300 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. 369 00:42:06,300 --> 00:42:16,170 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. 370 00:42:16,170 --> 00:42:22,590 Assuming the rightness of masculine authority necessarily meant a same review of male behaviour as responsible 371 00:42:22,590 --> 00:42:29,630 and benign xenophobes and a few other women suggested that men's conclusions about male behaviour, 372 00:42:29,630 --> 00:42:32,100 we're looking at sexual behaviour. 373 00:42:32,100 --> 00:42:40,140 They knew the tensions between notions of what was 12 of companionate marriage and implacable masculine authority the phone. 374 00:42:40,140 --> 00:42:46,680 They knew the degree to which companionate marriage rested on female minds. 375 00:42:46,680 --> 00:42:55,320 All right. I'll just quickly say, like other writers who is engaged in self-promotion activities, sending your books to newspaper editors, 376 00:42:55,320 --> 00:43:03,810 responding promptly when a periodical got something wrong or omitted her name and rejecting others critiques with her view. 377 00:43:03,810 --> 00:43:06,060 I've given you a taste of her debating style. 378 00:43:06,060 --> 00:43:14,910 Forceful and persistent in later life, she negotiated restrictions on female seclusion as older women, especially older single women, could do. 379 00:43:14,910 --> 00:43:20,220 And that's what she was, and she was a physical presence in journal offices. 380 00:43:20,220 --> 00:43:26,910 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. 381 00:43:26,910 --> 00:43:35,160 So just like her own life, did not adhere to prevailing expectations for women this year. 382 00:43:35,160 --> 00:43:42,060 The choice that she made to be single writing and publishing to the two marriages actually. 383 00:43:42,060 --> 00:43:50,940 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. 384 00:43:50,940 --> 00:43:57,570 Most important thing is her insistence throughout that women should be public figures. 385 00:43:57,570 --> 00:44:01,350 She used the rhetorical conceit a number of times, 386 00:44:01,350 --> 00:44:11,470 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. 387 00:44:11,470 --> 00:44:18,180 So instead of through access to newspapers, through women's conversations and for discussions with men, 388 00:44:18,180 --> 00:44:24,960 public explanations work was neither invisible nor inaccessible to women. 389 00:44:24,960 --> 00:44:31,420 No career, however, becomes a fixture of some irony influenzas later life, as does ability, 390 00:44:31,420 --> 00:44:36,490 but she became a paid informer for the palace in the last decade of her life. 391 00:44:36,490 --> 00:44:46,870 And ironically, the only real evidence I have of her daily life are the reports that she wrote for the Palace. 392 00:44:46,870 --> 00:44:53,110 And they are totally fascinating, and I translate a number of them in the final chapter of my book. 393 00:44:53,110 --> 00:44:55,660 I can't go into you here. It's way too complicated. 394 00:44:55,660 --> 00:45:06,220 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, 395 00:45:06,220 --> 00:45:12,580 I've got this woman, I really want to hire her. Because he says, after all, men don't know how to keep secrets. 396 00:45:12,580 --> 00:45:16,780 They tell their wives everything and their wives, which help them everything. 397 00:45:16,780 --> 00:45:21,340 And they told her a lot. This is really uncomfortable. 398 00:45:21,340 --> 00:45:24,790 However, as a biographer, as a feminist biographer, 399 00:45:24,790 --> 00:45:34,570 as somebody who identifies with Wisam for less and just worked under a long time because at this point in her life, 400 00:45:34,570 --> 00:45:45,310 you see her betraying people, using girls education cynically and trying to draw other men into the spy network. 401 00:45:45,310 --> 00:45:54,100 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 402 00:45:54,100 --> 00:45:59,020 and it shows how important households and women were to the political scene, 403 00:45:59,020 --> 00:46:06,580 and it also shows how much the women knew. She transcribed conversations amongst the women about the latest newspapers that have 404 00:46:06,580 --> 00:46:12,610 started publishing and who runs them as these women know exactly what's going on. 405 00:46:12,610 --> 00:46:20,050 But it also makes when you think about the messiness of life and the fact that we cannot idealise our subjects 406 00:46:20,050 --> 00:46:29,990 and we have to take in all parts of life and acknowledge that acknowledge that misunderstandings about it. 407 00:46:29,990 --> 00:46:35,960 So in some ways, it's feminist thinking, French Islamic ethical worldview, 408 00:46:35,960 --> 00:46:40,550 this distinct not only from prevailing separate but equal views of gender abilities, 409 00:46:40,550 --> 00:46:47,090 but also from prevailing modernist views imposing a non-essentials open ended notion of gender. 410 00:46:47,090 --> 00:46:52,610 This is really quite remarkable for that leads anywhere, not just in Egypt. 411 00:46:52,610 --> 00:46:57,080 Her approach is particularly striking given the durability of the notion of fixed, 412 00:46:57,080 --> 00:47:03,030 biologically determined gender assignment, but still includes debates on Islam and gender. 413 00:47:03,030 --> 00:47:10,250 So often not always supporting her rhetoric was not about identity, but about position. 414 00:47:10,250 --> 00:47:16,190 It was less about process itself than about her sense of audience and the persona she wanted to protect. 415 00:47:16,190 --> 00:47:22,010 And actually, she she very saw lexicon, according to the audience, who is very savvy about that. 416 00:47:22,010 --> 00:47:30,890 On one level, she gives an Islamic lexicon to describe aspects of a particular everyday practise on another level. 417 00:47:30,890 --> 00:47:36,830 She applied it as a universal or potentially shareable grounding for the good society. 418 00:47:36,830 --> 00:47:44,810 On occasion, she chose terms associated with Islamic practise to characterise Europeans and non-Muslim segment. 419 00:47:44,810 --> 00:47:49,730 I'm not suggesting that this was cynical. Surely it founded in personal belief, 420 00:47:49,730 --> 00:47:54,440 but it was still a rhetorical political choice that it became more pronounced as 421 00:47:54,440 --> 00:47:59,540 a speaking position and as a collective identity and related writings provides a 422 00:47:59,540 --> 00:48:05,150 graphic example of how European Islamophobic discourse around nineteen hundreds 423 00:48:05,150 --> 00:48:11,740 helped to create the Muslim solidarity that this same disparate soldier fought. 424 00:48:11,740 --> 00:48:18,880 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, 425 00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:24,850 but I hope this suggests the vitality and intensity of late vitamins, including Egyptian intellectuals, 426 00:48:24,850 --> 00:48:29,680 engagements with questions of gender as meaning as central to understanding 427 00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:35,620 political and social organisation in a changing world of gender assignment, 428 00:48:35,620 --> 00:48:42,550 which I was accused the misogynist doctor difficulty of mislabelling as this tyranny 429 00:48:42,550 --> 00:48:47,800 that you found nature and just wrote in one of her many contributions to public debate. 430 00:48:47,800 --> 00:48:53,090 Thank you very much. Thank you. OK, I neglected to mention at the beginning, 431 00:48:53,090 --> 00:48:58,420 perhaps because I was dazzled by the presence of a live audience for the first time in two years 432 00:48:58,420 --> 00:49:05,230 that those of you who are attending remotely can ask question by using the Q&A function on Zoom. 433 00:49:05,230 --> 00:49:09,400 And so if you take your questions there, I will try to beat it out. 434 00:49:09,400 --> 00:49:14,170 And if you want to be anonymous, then say so. Otherwise I will identify you. 435 00:49:14,170 --> 00:49:24,730 I have a question about her sheer background. I mean, in my early contemporary experience, 436 00:49:24,730 --> 00:49:36,450 I have sometimes been taken aback by the negative attitudes expressed towards shades by Egyptians who have never actually met a real person. 437 00:49:36,450 --> 00:49:41,410 I'm guessing that in the late 19th, early 20th century, things were very different, 438 00:49:41,410 --> 00:49:51,880 but I'm wondering what level of awareness there was of her background and whether it mattered to people and if so, how. 439 00:49:51,880 --> 00:50:00,160 And I was actually also wondering if did from the background gave her a kind of insider outsider status, 440 00:50:00,160 --> 00:50:11,800 which perhaps lends itself to things like espionage, but also lent itself to things like, you know, her relatively radical issues? 441 00:50:11,800 --> 00:50:16,450 Those are all really good questions, and I've wondered about them a lot. 442 00:50:16,450 --> 00:50:24,970 The only place that I've seen where her background comes in explicitly in her writings is in her biographical dictionary. 443 00:50:24,970 --> 00:50:35,170 There are actually more biographies of either Shiite or protege or supporters of Ali than you might expect. 444 00:50:35,170 --> 00:50:49,420 And whenever she mentions the name Alia, she says she either says a lot about the word or my own my. 445 00:50:49,420 --> 00:50:55,180 So there's a little bit of a thing there, but it's it's pretty, pretty minor. 446 00:50:55,180 --> 00:50:59,290 It's really hard to know how much people knew and what they thought. 447 00:50:59,290 --> 00:51:06,850 And in some ways, in some cases, it seems that people even assumed that she was Egyptian, which, you know, 448 00:51:06,850 --> 00:51:14,530 then you might think, Well, this kind of suggests that maybe she did immigrate pretty early if she found it. 449 00:51:14,530 --> 00:51:20,620 You know, it's one of these many question marks that we have. It also may be because she wasn't. 450 00:51:20,620 --> 00:51:27,250 These may have been people who didn't hear her voice. After all, she was sitting at home writing and sending things to newspapers. 451 00:51:27,250 --> 00:51:33,100 But even a couple of these newspaper editors kind of assume that she's Egyptian or seemed to think so. 452 00:51:33,100 --> 00:51:37,780 And so it's very there's just none of the biographies. 453 00:51:37,780 --> 00:51:45,500 Is there anything? And she is celebrated, as I mentioned to the editor inside an insider. 454 00:51:45,500 --> 00:51:52,330 You know, he celebrates her in his journal, which is a journal of human history and identity. 455 00:51:52,330 --> 00:51:55,730 But I'm not saying I don't think people in Egypt are really reading that. 456 00:51:55,730 --> 00:52:01,660 And so, you know, I'm not sure how many people really, really did know. 457 00:52:01,660 --> 00:52:06,250 And then what difference does it make? Who knows? I mean, it's a big question mark also. 458 00:52:06,250 --> 00:52:11,530 Here she is with all these quite radical views. She was also monolingual. 459 00:52:11,530 --> 00:52:14,740 She didn't read any European languages. 460 00:52:14,740 --> 00:52:23,470 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. 461 00:52:23,470 --> 00:52:30,100 It had something to do with having this somewhat unorthodox background. 462 00:52:30,100 --> 00:52:34,150 Did it have anything to do with being, Gee, I can't. I don't. 463 00:52:34,150 --> 00:52:37,900 I don't argue that it does, because I have no, that's just too speculative. 464 00:52:37,900 --> 00:52:41,770 There's just no indication, but it's interesting to think about. 465 00:52:41,770 --> 00:52:46,450 Sorry, that's not a very good answer, but but it's the best, I guess. 466 00:52:46,450 --> 00:52:54,850 So I want to talk a little with that person because it reminds you. 467 00:52:54,850 --> 00:53:00,190 Yeah, I should say in the book, I really enjoyed it. 468 00:53:00,190 --> 00:53:06,270 So guys in a funny 150 expressions and. 469 00:53:06,270 --> 00:53:25,020 I've got the election, and I I've you some speculation about whether this is possible in this country. 470 00:53:25,020 --> 00:53:38,400 And as far as I can tell her sort of participation in those debates in the early 20th century as a just a Muslim, 471 00:53:38,400 --> 00:53:44,760 I mean she she seems to be pretty participating in Sunni debates as much as any of the debates. 472 00:53:44,760 --> 00:53:50,550 And I just wonder, are these identities becoming more salient now? 473 00:53:50,550 --> 00:53:55,560 I have a similar experience to Walter about going there. 474 00:53:55,560 --> 00:54:00,420 And yeah, so yeah, I think it's a good question. 475 00:54:00,420 --> 00:54:07,470 I think it would take a lot more of the collective research to think about these. 476 00:54:07,470 --> 00:54:15,000 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, 477 00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:21,960 maybe they did give somebody more of an insider outsider perspective that made it easier to kind of step back and see things. 478 00:54:21,960 --> 00:54:30,840 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 479 00:54:30,840 --> 00:54:36,330 figures and just try to pick some of this apart and look at some of their writings and think, 480 00:54:36,330 --> 00:54:42,300 is there a way in which we can see this as somehow linked in to these these identities? 481 00:54:42,300 --> 00:54:45,090 So, you know, I would love to explore that more. 482 00:54:45,090 --> 00:54:54,240 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. 483 00:54:54,240 --> 00:54:59,970 I'm so sick of this. Like, Oh, the westernised Syrian Christians did this and the Muslims did that. 484 00:54:59,970 --> 00:55:03,300 Well, it was not that straightforward. 485 00:55:03,300 --> 00:55:09,900 And so I I'm a little bit, but I do think these are absolutely fascinating questions and especially these kind of, 486 00:55:09,900 --> 00:55:15,040 you know, people coming from these various kinds of minority backgrounds. 487 00:55:15,040 --> 00:55:24,440 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. 488 00:55:24,440 --> 00:55:28,860 But let me read one of the online questions, this is from Rosa Marx. 489 00:55:28,860 --> 00:55:33,380 Your question is, first of all, she says, thank you so much for your talk. I was just wondering, 490 00:55:33,380 --> 00:55:43,370 do you think policies and means conceptions of modern woman and modern gender relations had a positive effect on Egyptian women as a whole, 491 00:55:43,370 --> 00:55:55,490 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. 492 00:55:55,490 --> 00:56:00,080 You know, she kind of disappears from view after her death, 493 00:56:00,080 --> 00:56:07,760 except that quite a few writers go on using entries from her biographical dictionary and reproducing those. 494 00:56:07,760 --> 00:56:13,940 So you see those and you see them not only an error that you see them in Turkish, for instance. 495 00:56:13,940 --> 00:56:23,360 It's really it's really rich. And I I'm not sure I need to do more thinking about her legacy. 496 00:56:23,360 --> 00:56:27,500 Originally, I was going to do that in this book, but I kind of ran out of steam. 497 00:56:27,500 --> 00:56:34,130 And I also was already to lunch, and I also kind of thought, maybe it's just going to end with her death. 498 00:56:34,130 --> 00:56:44,600 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, 499 00:56:44,600 --> 00:56:49,110 things have changed much and there was a whole new generation of activists. 500 00:56:49,110 --> 00:56:57,590 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, 501 00:56:57,590 --> 00:57:02,630 such as ancient time war happening, also were remembered. 502 00:57:02,630 --> 00:57:08,750 It's really hard to know. I wish I knew more about the impact, but there isn't. 503 00:57:08,750 --> 00:57:15,110 Unfortunately, there isn't really any evidence that people were reading her after the war. 504 00:57:15,110 --> 00:57:24,350 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. 505 00:57:24,350 --> 00:57:35,240 But I do suspect that probably at least for the the relatively small number of activists, probably her work was significant. 506 00:57:35,240 --> 00:57:43,100 And in that sense, we might see a longer kind of influence, but I can't point to any very specific way. 507 00:57:43,100 --> 00:57:52,550 And in fact, I think she's much more radical in her thinking than a lot of this sort of. 508 00:57:52,550 --> 00:57:59,960 A lot of the debates that are that have gone on since then. I think you right? 509 00:57:59,960 --> 00:58:06,430 I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about why admissions threats outside of Egypt? 510 00:58:06,430 --> 00:58:15,420 Yeah, again, I don't know, and this is always when one is a text in that period, readerships are very hard to pass. 511 00:58:15,420 --> 00:58:23,670 She did write, and she probably was read to some extent because these some of these journals that she 512 00:58:23,670 --> 00:58:28,530 wrote in we know things related outside of Egypt and even outside of the Arab world. 513 00:58:28,530 --> 00:58:37,560 In fact, it was always having problems with the British, not allowing it into India or the French not allowing it into Algeria. 514 00:58:37,560 --> 00:58:42,600 So we know there were attempts and we do know that people elsewhere did read this, 515 00:58:42,600 --> 00:58:47,520 and some people in Europe were reading these these journals because you get letters coming in. 516 00:58:47,520 --> 00:58:52,980 So, so now of course, I can't say for sure if they were reading her, but they were definitely there were these. 517 00:58:52,980 --> 00:58:54,760 These newspapers were circulated, 518 00:58:54,760 --> 00:59:02,070 and one thing that is really interesting about her is that she definitely had a sense of of getting herself out there. 519 00:59:02,070 --> 00:59:09,780 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 520 00:59:09,780 --> 00:59:16,230 a congenial place and its editor really became kind of a mentor to her also because he probably just gave her more space. 521 00:59:16,230 --> 00:59:23,310 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. 522 00:59:23,310 --> 00:59:29,880 Or, Oh, we didn't realise how wonderful it is for women to be single, so we're not going to publish anymore. 523 00:59:29,880 --> 00:59:39,980 We don't. We don't know. We do know with the with the said and her, the Beirut newspaper that the Ottoman censors. 524 00:59:39,980 --> 00:59:45,410 And about late 1894, early 1895. 525 00:59:45,410 --> 00:59:52,190 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. 526 00:59:52,190 --> 00:59:58,970 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. 527 00:59:58,970 --> 01:00:07,190 And it's. And I had it before I found that that source, I had wondered because there is a point where instead of. 528 01:00:07,190 --> 01:00:10,610 Suddenly there seemed to be no women and you're like, What's going on? 529 01:00:10,610 --> 01:00:18,920 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. 530 01:00:18,920 --> 01:00:22,850 So you think, well, maybe these women just kind of migrated from the centre help. 531 01:00:22,850 --> 01:00:31,970 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. 532 01:00:31,970 --> 01:00:36,920 And of course, we have to keep in mind that the numbers of literate people were small. 533 01:00:36,920 --> 01:00:41,840 On the other hand, newspapers did get read out loud, as we see in that wonderful vignette. 534 01:00:41,840 --> 01:00:46,790 She's talking about the women reading a riot. So, you know, it's hard to. 535 01:00:46,790 --> 01:00:56,300 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, 536 01:00:56,300 --> 01:01:05,150 other people talk about in the in other journals they talk about, Oh, you know, we read what the wonderful fellows wrote. 537 01:01:05,150 --> 01:01:07,460 But again, you don't know how seriously we take that. 538 01:01:07,460 --> 01:01:17,810 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. 539 01:01:17,810 --> 01:01:23,300 They're always either they're either praising each other or they're totally casting insults. 540 01:01:23,300 --> 01:01:29,330 I mean, it's like nothing. So it's very hard to know how seriously to take some of that. 541 01:01:29,330 --> 01:01:38,050 But she also she featured a couple of times and would be the Hurston's magazine, for sure. 542 01:01:38,050 --> 01:01:44,300 And that was a magazine that got around. I mean, it definitely got all over the Ottoman Empire. 543 01:01:44,300 --> 01:01:48,810 It got to Latin America. It probably got to parts of North America. 544 01:01:48,810 --> 01:01:52,220 So she would have been read by some people. 545 01:01:52,220 --> 01:02:02,870 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. 546 01:02:02,870 --> 01:02:11,370 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 547 01:02:11,370 --> 01:02:20,190 her native Lebanon after she left and what kind of influence the state provided Egypt granted to Gillam says wonderful talk. 548 01:02:20,190 --> 01:02:24,260 Marilyn definitely is. Zainab was this feminist in so many ways. 549 01:02:24,260 --> 01:02:32,880 I'm wondering about her relations with rural women in Egypt and her dad working with other women within Egypt and neighbouring Arab countries. 550 01:02:32,880 --> 01:02:43,870 I had one question also from Campbell Padgett, about respire, and his question was whether she did it for. 551 01:02:43,870 --> 01:02:51,100 Financial exigency gets no money. Where did she have some higher motive? 552 01:02:51,100 --> 01:02:59,830 In terms of Lebanon? That's a really fascinating question again, because she she never went back to general, as far as we know. 553 01:02:59,830 --> 01:03:07,820 She did a couple of times. The family came to Cairo and she apparently saw them. 554 01:03:07,820 --> 01:03:15,800 But there's a whole tragic sub layer to that family as well, which I'm not going to go into. 555 01:03:15,800 --> 01:03:24,140 She was the this this editor I mentioned the adefisayo was. 556 01:03:24,140 --> 01:03:31,760 Very interested in her and published a number of her works, and he published several biographies, 557 01:03:31,760 --> 01:03:38,760 although these are part of the problematic, I mean, I don't know, it's like one of my associates but contradicts other sources. 558 01:03:38,760 --> 01:03:45,410 But anyway, so he was very keen that people in Lebanon should know about her, and I think she did. 559 01:03:45,410 --> 01:03:48,080 She did become a little bit of an icon there. 560 01:03:48,080 --> 01:03:55,220 But as I said at the same time, he praised her for being, you know, she's writing and she's made her famous. 561 01:03:55,220 --> 01:04:01,400 But she has such extreme views, you know, so so there's this kind of this kind of double edged thing. 562 01:04:01,400 --> 01:04:07,850 And then also she I mentioned a second marriage and she actually this is also interesting. 563 01:04:07,850 --> 01:04:15,730 She went to Damascus. She contracted a marriage by mail. 564 01:04:15,730 --> 01:04:23,410 And they are online. Well, I think he's, you know, online dating. 565 01:04:23,410 --> 01:04:26,890 He married without having met him. 566 01:04:26,890 --> 01:04:38,620 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. 567 01:04:38,620 --> 01:04:43,660 And so the contract was already made and she was still in Alexandria. He was there. 568 01:04:43,660 --> 01:04:50,020 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. 569 01:04:50,020 --> 01:04:53,920 One is that he forgot to mention a couple of details for her, 570 01:04:53,920 --> 01:05:04,960 like the fact that he was married to three other women and that he expected her apparently to educate the daughters. 571 01:05:04,960 --> 01:05:11,290 And then there are some other and also that she she went kind of crazy because they a maths person, 572 01:05:11,290 --> 01:05:16,430 but he actually was a civil servant in a small village in the end. 573 01:05:16,430 --> 01:05:22,270 For some of this time, she could not get Egyptian newspapers in the house, and she really hated that. 574 01:05:22,270 --> 01:05:26,590 So she ended up demanding a divorce and going back to Cairo. 575 01:05:26,590 --> 01:05:30,970 But she did have while she was injured. The reason I'm mentioning this is while she was in Damascus, 576 01:05:30,970 --> 01:05:39,610 she apparently did have a sort of small salon that men came to, and as was true of the other salons, 577 01:05:39,610 --> 01:05:50,200 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. 578 01:05:50,200 --> 01:06:04,430 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. 579 01:06:04,430 --> 01:06:12,310 So she definitely there's I mean, when I say the legacy question, it is really tricky because early on I don't know. 580 01:06:12,310 --> 01:06:18,940 But she's become now that she's become now more of a figure and people want to claim for and so forth. 581 01:06:18,940 --> 01:06:23,600 So. Randy, thank you for coming. 582 01:06:23,600 --> 01:06:30,860 Relations with rural women. This is really interesting, too, I think, more than relations with rural women. 583 01:06:30,860 --> 01:06:37,460 She definitely I don't know how how much of a sort of personal contact this was. 584 01:06:37,460 --> 01:06:43,760 But she wrote about urban working women a number of times and about the plight of servants. 585 01:06:43,760 --> 01:06:49,010 And so again, unlike most of the other people were writing on gender at that time. 586 01:06:49,010 --> 01:06:56,570 She really shows a a pretty deep sympathy, at least with working class. 587 01:06:56,570 --> 01:07:01,700 And she also talks about rural women, and she does this over and over again to say, 588 01:07:01,700 --> 01:07:07,940 you know, stop talking about women sitting at home because most women in Egypt don't. 589 01:07:07,940 --> 01:07:20,450 They're out working. So she definitely had a sense of women of rural and urban working class women as an important, you know, 590 01:07:20,450 --> 01:07:28,730 as a really significant group that she cared about, and she was very sympathetically about the spying question. 591 01:07:28,730 --> 01:07:36,950 OK, I think I think it's both my sense of it is that she definitely does need money. 592 01:07:36,950 --> 01:07:45,270 There's no question, in fact, when again, when her handler writes this fascinating letter to the palace, ostensibly to the positive, 593 01:07:45,270 --> 01:07:52,200 although probably other people are reading it but saying, you know, I've got this woman that I really think can help us out. 594 01:07:52,200 --> 01:07:54,590 You know, she'll need to be paid. 595 01:07:54,590 --> 01:08:05,120 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. 596 01:08:05,120 --> 01:08:09,890 And I just, you know, this is amazing. So she really did. She definitely needed money. 597 01:08:09,890 --> 01:08:19,760 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. 598 01:08:19,760 --> 01:08:23,300 You feel like she loves this, you know? 599 01:08:23,300 --> 01:08:28,040 And again, which is great. And she's always kind of showing with the way she writes. 600 01:08:28,040 --> 01:08:33,380 She's showing whoever is going to read these things, how good she is at this spy games. 601 01:08:33,380 --> 01:08:37,610 You know, she's almost like saying, you know, look at me, look how look, how well I'm doing this. 602 01:08:37,610 --> 01:08:41,600 She is very good. I have to say she's very good at it, it seems. 603 01:08:41,600 --> 01:08:46,550 So I think she really she really kind of. 604 01:08:46,550 --> 01:08:51,470 Enjoyed it, I don't know if that's the right word, but she she found some kind of satisfaction in it. 605 01:08:51,470 --> 01:08:59,000 She also in this she went over and above what the handler, at least as far as we know, told her. 606 01:08:59,000 --> 01:09:07,160 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. 607 01:09:07,160 --> 01:09:11,420 But she did. So we have a number of times where she's reporting, and it's fascinating. 608 01:09:11,420 --> 01:09:18,110 She reports on a conversation she has with procedure that she goes to the office of el-Banna and she has. 609 01:09:18,110 --> 01:09:21,920 This amazing conversation was received about the British. 610 01:09:21,920 --> 01:09:31,660 Another time she goes and she talks with one of the editors and whether it's the person or not. 611 01:09:31,660 --> 01:09:37,610 Not sure, but it probably is. And so she was really quite fearless. 612 01:09:37,610 --> 01:09:47,060 She wanted to be out there. She was also a great supporter of most of the candidates for the important nationalist leader. 613 01:09:47,060 --> 01:09:58,580 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. 614 01:09:58,580 --> 01:10:07,340 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. 615 01:10:07,340 --> 01:10:14,690 So I think she never actually stood up and claimed it. But her column was printed along with all these poems by men. 616 01:10:14,690 --> 01:10:21,470 So she really, I mean, I think she really felt quite quite. 617 01:10:21,470 --> 01:10:25,760 She very much wanted to be out there in the world to do these things. 618 01:10:25,760 --> 01:10:30,140 And, you know, once she was older, she could she could get away with it. 619 01:10:30,140 --> 01:10:38,800 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? 620 01:10:38,800 --> 01:10:41,650 I mean, did she have political reasons for doing this? 621 01:10:41,650 --> 01:10:50,620 I just don't know, because it's sort of contradictory because one of the people she's spying on is one, for instance, 622 01:10:50,620 --> 01:10:58,120 is one of Canada's most trusted deputies, and she's basically partly responsible, probably for sending him to jail. 623 01:10:58,120 --> 01:11:01,120 And he was also a great supporter of women's rights. 624 01:11:01,120 --> 01:11:08,470 So it's very, very hard to know what know what are the political investments here are that is that is a conundrum. 625 01:11:08,470 --> 01:11:11,760 I want to do some more writing and thinking about those spy reports. 626 01:11:11,760 --> 01:11:18,080 I mean, I do have a chapter part of a chapter on them, but I think they deserve more attention. 627 01:11:18,080 --> 01:11:23,960 OK. So thank you for a great job, great ones on top of the other great works. 628 01:11:23,960 --> 01:11:28,280 And let's go celebrate the reception. Thank you. 629 01:11:28,280 --> 01:11:41,868 Thank you.