Daughters of the Nile: Photographs of Egyptian Women's Movements, 1900-1960 (review)

Had it been written a decade ago, Daughters of the Nile would have been on the cutting edge of research on the history of Egyptian women's political activism. At that time, attempts to write women back into Egypt's modern history were just beginning to bear fruit, at times complementing and at other times challenging and rewriting conventional historical narratives. Appearing now, Daughters of the Nile, a compilation of photographs celebrating half a century of Egyptian women's activism and participation in political movements, appears a bit old fashioned. It neither draws on the most recent scholarship on women in Egypt, which has attempted to move beyond a focus on notable women to the project of recovering voices by exploring how gender worked as a constitutive element of political and social discourse, nor does it add much to the work by scholars such as Margot Badran and Beth Baron, whose pioneering monographs set the standard for Egyptian women's history in the early 1990s.

Still, there are things to recommend this thoughtful compilation of photographs. Editors Hind and Nadia Wassef clearly have exerted an enormous amount of effort in gathering a wide variety of images, some of which are from private collections and never before have appeared in published form, as well as many others that appeared in the popular and women's press. These include formal portraits of prominent women activists and photos chronicling their various activities. These are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, a recognition by the authors that "developments seldom occur in historical narrative's linear terms" (4).

Captions are simple and in many cases allow the images to speak for themselves. An introduction does the work of laying out the theoretical and historical context necessary to guide readers.

One of the most noteworthy and novel aspects of the book is that it is bilingual: both the introduction and the captions are presented in English and Arabic, making it more accessible to an Egyptian audience. The inclusion of English and Arabic in the same book speaks to the aims of the work itself. The editors, both active in women's issues in Egypt, locate their project as a work of scholarship and a self-conscious feminist attempt to reclaim a very rich heritage of Egyptian women's involvement in politics and social movements for a new generation of women activists, hence the book's emphasis on women's "agency."

According to the editors, most scholars have analyzed photographs of Middle Eastern women through the lens of anti-Orientalist critique, "presenting a one-sided view that emphasizes women's subjectivity and denies women agency" (2). This collection is a useful attempt to shift the focus from how photography portrayed women to how women appropriated photographic technology to serve their own ends. The photos, particularly those that appeared in the women's and popular press, speak to the ways in which politically active Egyptian women began to court the press for its power to disseminate images. This raises some interesting issues, but they are not issues that are, or can be, fully explored without additional analysis of the individual photos themselves, as well as a more extended history of Egyptian photography and photographers in the first half of the twentieth century.

Largely missing from the work are photos of non-elite women. The authors, to their credit, are conscious of the "gap between housemaids and hanims" in the collection and make an effort to address the issue in the introduction. But this absence speaks to the wider theoretical and conceptual choices made by the authors. It is not simply that photos of non-elite women are not represented in the collection. It is also the aim of the authors themselves to write women back into an ultimately nationalist narrative of history. This work succeeds, but one wonders if the narrative itself could have been decentered further. How, for example, did the leaders...