Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics

7. Partisans of the Wafd

chapter seven Partisans of the Wafd The Wafd spearheaded the nationalist movement, and most Egyptian nationalists—male and female—fell in behind the “party of the nation.” Elite women attempted to secure a political niche for themselves by founding an auxiliary party organization—the Women’s Wafd—and by starting political periodicals that supported the Wafd. Yet these women wanted more than a symbolic role. In the wake of the revolution, the “lady demonstrators” of March 1919 sought to share the nationalist stage with male politicians. They wanted to be taken seriously as political actors and to push women’s political culture in new directions. This chapter cuts from a star player—Safiyya Zaghlul—to the circle of female nationalists involved in the Wafd in the interwar period. It pulls the lens back from Huda Sha‘rawi, first president of the Women’s Wafd, to look at her competitors and successors; from the center in Cairo to activities in other cities and towns; and from members of the auxiliary party to female political journalists. The female notables of the Women’s Wafd and Wafdist female journalists used multiple strategies to make their voices heard in shaping government and making policy. They both demonstrated against the British and remonstrated with Egyptian politicians , waging a two-front battle. They did so on a shifting terrain as Egyptians moved from the fluidity of revolution to the rigidity of a structured politics of parties, parliament, and the palace. Wafdist women tried to maintain unity yet proved unable to stay above the fray of partisan politics for long. They quickly learned that they could 162 not be both a part of politics and apart from partisanship, a perhaps unrealistic ideal. Once they became entangled, they clashed with one another, as well as with the Wafd leadership. Male Wafdists attempted to push women from the playing field just when Egyptians had successfully wrested some control of the state from the British. The press was complicit in this process in that it gendered parliamentary and party politics as male, thereby excluding women from certain spheres. Women continued to chip away at this exclusion and simultaneously sought other paths to politics. memory and memoirs The story of the Women’s Wafd figures marginally in most accounts of Egyptian nationalism. Likewise, it flits in and out of the story of Egyptian feminism, prominent when Huda Sha‘rawi presided, but receiving little coverage after Huda’s break with Sa‘d.1 Yet this break did not spell the end of the Women’s Wafd or of Wafdist women’s endeavors in the field of journalism. We can tell the continuation of this story in part because three of the most active Wafdist women—Huda Sha‘rawi (1879–1947), Munira Thabit (1902–67), and Fatima (Ruz) al-Yusuf (1898–1958)—left memoirs, and a fourth—Esther Fahmi Wisa (1895–1990)—was memorialized in a son’s family history.2 These four women are chosen as the focus of the story here not only because they were prominent players but because of the records they left. They sought to shape history and memory in an effort to have their lives and political activism remembered in specific ways. Their memoirs, and memories of them, reveal that they wanted to be considered important political actors who were at the center of the action in the interwar period and beyond. These memoirs remind us that memories can be fallible, particularly after a long lapse, but contemporary periodicals and archival records help sort out some of the confusion. These political memoirs appeared in different decades and documented active lives, anticipating or reacting to one another. Munira’s Thawra fi . . . al-Burj al-‘Aji (Revolution in the Ivory Tower) came in the wake of World War II (1946) and recorded her struggle for women’s political rights. Fatima al-Yusuf’s Dhikrayat appeared a year after the 1952 revolution , covering her early life in theater and second career in journalism . Huda’s Mudhakkirat, discussing her family life, feminism, and nationalist activism, were dictated to her secretary in the 1930s but did not appear in print in their entirety until 1981 (over thirty years after Partisans of the Wafd 163 her death). Esther Fahmi Wisa’s son, Hanna, brought out his Englishlanguage family memoir Assiout: The Saga of an Egyptian Family in 1994, four years after the death of his mother, whose role in nationalist politics...