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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 686-687



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May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. By Marilyn Booth (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001) 460pp. $65.00 cloth $35.00 paper


Scholars in the field of Middle East women's studies have recently discovered a treasure trove of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian language sources in the form of women's magazines and journals dating from the turn of the twentieth century and later. Beth Baron's important work, The Women's Awakening in Egypt (New Haven, 1994), was the first published social history of the Arabic-language women's press in Egypt. It made use of writings for, by, and about women in the popular press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Booth builds on this scholarship to examine in a more a focused and detailed fashion a particular genre within the larger Egyptian women's press of this period, biographies of famous women written by both women and men.

Booth explores the discourses of nationalism and feminism in biographies published in women's magazines and biographical collections of the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Biographies of famous women were a common genre in pre-1940s-era women's magazines that, Booth argues, were intended to entertain as much as instruct and provide exemplary models for Egyptian women. She makes a special case for biography as exposing the contradictions and ambivalences of feminism, nationalism, and modernity; writers used both indigenous and foreign discourses and personalities to imagine the nation. Booth also argues that biographical profiles, as documents that reflect new developments and practices of the emerging middle classes—such as consumption patterns, dress styles, social interaction, and domestic arrangements—are important primary sources for historians. However, the book is not a social history of Egyptian women, but rather a study of how various discourses of a given period shaped ideal gender roles and expectations.

Booth skillfully combines methodological strategies from the fields of literary studies and history to produce an informative and dense description and analysis of the genre of biography in women's magazines. She examines various rhetorical and discursive patterns, the construction of a textual audience, and the selection of women subjects and their representation. Her literary analysis succeeds in contextualizing her sources and their content in the different social and political environments of colonialism, nationalism, and Islamism. "Famous Women" biographies articulated the gendered organization of society and offered various female role models that corresponded to the nationalist imperatives and constraints of the moment. For example, Booth traces the construction of ideal females from the queen to the companionate wife, educated mother, and political activist of the 1920s and 1930s and, finally, to the Muslim woman of the 1980s and 1990s. She does not construct a linear typology but outlines and compares various competing ideals of womanhood [End Page 686] written in the context of the dominant discourses of the century (modernist, liberal, nationalist, reformist, and Islamist).

 



Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi
California State University, Long Beach

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