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>> 137 6 Amateur Historians, the “Woman Question,” and the Production of Modern History in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Egypt Lisa Pollard the“WomanQuestion”inTurn-of-20th-CenturyEgypt Egyptian women only recently played critical roles in the eighteen days of protests that toppled Mohammed Husni Mubarak’s thirty-year presidency on February 11, 2011.1 Photographs of the demonstrations revealed women marching in the streets, confronting both the military and the Egyptian riot police, and tending to the sick and wounded in Tahrir Square. Similarly, video clips, recorded and released just prior to the outbreak of demonstrations on January 25, 2011, showed women openly discussing their behindthe -scenes roles in organizing the protests via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.2 For Western observers, such images of Egyptian women fighting for political change stood in stark contrast to the depictions of passive and sequestered Muslim women that have dominated the media since September 11, 2001. For Egyptians, however, the presence of women in the streets linked the revolution of 2011 to a century of protests and revolutions in which women have been active participants. The role of women in political uprisings has been the source of Egyptian pride since women took to the streets against the British in 1919. Indeed, each March, the Egyptian press commemorates International Women’s Day with photographs of women-led demonstrations from March 1919. Those photographs illustrate the critical roles women played in guaranteeing the birth of an independent Egyptian nation-state. It is difficult to find a historical account of 1919 that does not include a discussion of the roles women played in the revolution, engaging in activities that looked much like those their great-granddaughters would play in 2011. While Egyptian enthusiasm for women’s role in gaining their nation’s independence is almost a century old, the mainstream academic production of women’s history in Egypt is of relatively recent occurrence. Egyptian universities have housed history departments since the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet not until 1945, when the noted Egyptian feminist Doria Shafiq (1908–75), Sorbonne Ph.D. in hand, teamed up with Ibrahim `Abduh of Cairo University to pen The Development of the Women’s Awakening in 138 > 139 as well as the destiny, of the Egyptian people. The “woman question” remains a common vehicle through which nonacademic history—what historian Anthony Gorman calls “history in the streets”—is articulated, as journalists , intellectuals, and historians not allied with the academy use women as symbols through which to assert their versions of where the Egyptian people came from and where, as a nation, they ought to be headed.9 This chapter examines the nexus of the rise of the state, debates about women, and the emergence of a modern historical practice in nineteenthand turn-of-the-twentieth-century Egypt. Its focus is on amateur historians whose work formed the basis of what would become a profession after World War I. The legacy of those nonprofessionals’ concern with “the woman question ” was not the immediate mainstream production of women’s history from within the academy. Rather, amateur historians’ attention to women as symbols for narrating history resulted in a popular historical practice, in which “Lady Egypt,” the gendered-feminine embodiment of Egypt that emerged from turn-of-the-twentieth-century historical debates, continues to define Egyptians’ commentaries about the state of their nation.10 Amateur historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a mixed lot, ranging from Egyptian civil servants to British colonial officials . What each group had in common was a concern with defining modern Egypt. Beginning with an examination of literature produced in the nineteenth century by state officials, this chapter illustrates how Egyptians first came to understand Egypt as a distinct territory through attention to domestic practices. This literature created both gendered-feminine views of Egypt and linked women’s domestic behavior to the modernization process.11 European travel writers and the administrators who oversaw the British colonial state after 1882 furthered discussions about the relationship between Egyptian domestic practices and modernity by making the opposite argument : that the position of women in Egyptian society hampered its ability to be modern. The colonial officials who also wrote histories of what they called “modern” Egypt attributed British-authored reforms related to women to Egypt’s first steps toward modernity. Their histories joined those of an increasing number of amateur Egyptian “bureaucrat historians” who made similar arguments, but who attributed reform and modernization to efforts made...

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