May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (review)

In 1922, the excavation of King Tutankhamen’s tomb made Egypt’s ancient heritage prominent in the modernist global imaginary. In 2001, Egypt’s excoriation of writer Nawal El-Saadawi for ‘denouncing’ Islam brought out once again the contentious interweaving of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ that Booth’s book explores. This work adds significantly to a larger understanding of an underrepresented genre (women’s biography) and of Egypt as a modern nation-state throwing off British colonialism. It analyses the role that the “Famous Women” biographies and women’s magazines (1892–1939) played in the link between gender and the politics of nationalism, a relationship fundamental to African and Asian postcolonial research. The volume is a mine of information in its breathtaking depth and range of research — 571 biographies (including 267 issues of Young Woman of the East) and publications in 18 magazines, along with additional biographies from 1869 to1967.

The chronological sequence in the eight chapters of the volume demonstrates the evolution of the biography, from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, and underscores, usefully so, that the genre was a historically contingent form that flourished, declined, and experienced resurgence. Chapters 1 and 6 foreground individual subjects, the former Zaynab Fawwaz’s and Qadriyya Husayn’s pioneering work, and the latter Jeanne d’Arc biographies. The other chapters analyze women’s self-representations that shape and are shaped by the consumer market (chapter 2), the rhetorical strategies of some biographies (chapter 3), education and work as part of the conflicting agendas of “ideal femininities” (chapter 4), marriage and parenthood as the other part of that conflict (chapter 5), changing practices in biographical narratives (chapter 7), and the genre today (chapter 8). This arrangement is slightly puzzling in its separation of individuals from themes, and of themes from each other; for instance, chapters 4 and 5 reinforce the either/or binary rather than the dialectic that the author wishes to explore.

However, Booth is scrupulously aware of a number of critical ambivalences that women authors negotiate: that biographies celebrate male prominence, but is also a mode of honoring unique women; that even as they memorialize women’s self-determination through education and work, it is also a “disciplinary practice” (xxxvi) to inscribe women as the center of a communal identity based on the nuclear, heterosexual family; and that they neither solely approve nor resist nation. A good example of this “double move of expansion and constraint” (173) is the woman-behind-the-man narrative, a testament to a strong woman who is also a devoted wife, mother, and sister to a public patriarchy, evidence of a performative femininity shaping masculinity. While the author states her preference that conflict be seen as productive, one wonders whether there were other forms of Egyptian women’s struggles that remained incommensurable with dominant patriarchal agendas.

Booth depicts women biographers as strategists who not only record events and lives, but promote, edit, and narrativise intelligently in the minefield of discourse created by Islamists, secularists, men, women, natives and foreigners. The author does well to pay attention to the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural affiliations — Egyptian, Syrian, Muslim, Christian-in which class — affiliation supersedes other differences, leading to a diversity of elite nationalisms. Booth treads carefully on the inevitable question of whether that active negotiation on behalf of women’s progress could be called feminism, and keeps in mind the particularities of late 19th and early 20th century Egyptian sociopolitical history. ‘Western feminism’ is presented as only one strand in a syncretic modernist formation that mediated the apparent opposition between tradition and progress. This mediation is complicated by the fact that the author presents Islam as “flexible on social practice and gender [holding out] the possibility for women to make their own lives” (xxvi), a point that should be interesting post 9–11, especially in the context of the separation of religion, state, and nation, in which women’s discourses are not being considered an integral...