Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt by Laura Bier (review)

In Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt, historian Laura Bier provides the first book-length look at the Nasserist state’s program for women and gender or what some later referred to as state feminism. Core chapters deal with the state and the “working woman,” the Muslim Personal Status Laws, and the birth control campaign. A background chapter considers roots of state feminism in the decades prior to the 1952 revolution. The final chapter reflects on state feminism in the Third World. A separate conclusion examines effects of state feminism following the demise of Nasser.

This is a book about the socialist regime under Nasser and its initiatives, policies, and practices vis-à-vis women in the context of state-driven modernizing and development. There was no space for independent ideologies and public criticism under the relentless surveillance of this state. The Nasserist state assumed the mantle of benefactor and protector of its citizens. The authoritarian patriarchal state co-opted feminism, wresting from women control of their three decades’ old organized independent feminist activism.

State mobilization of women, building upon earlier efforts of independent feminists, extended work for women. It made a distinctive contribution in forcefully broadening new work opportunities across the class spectrum under socialism in ways that could not be achieved before, in the era of the “liberal experiment.” The state did not, however, accord similar determination to reducing gender inequities in the Muslim Personal Status Law. Herein lay serious sources of tension and contradiction in the state’s agenda for women. The state simultaneously moved toward egalitarianism in the public sphere state while allowing for the persistence of patriarchy in private sphere of the family. The promotion of work for women and reform of family law are not unconnected; the patriarchal family in the form of male authority figures could and often did trump the patriarchal state through controlling women’s work and broader movements.

Bier astutely observes that debate about women and work during the Nasser period arose not because of women’s exclusion from the workforce but because of the state’s drive to include women in the public productivity. (It might be added that the state promoted this debate.) The author contrasts this with nationalist debates in the early twentieth century, which she claims asserted that women’s work and proper place was in the family. If most male nationalists held this position, the pioneering feminist nationalists made strong claims about women’s right to work outside the home in professions and occupations of their choice. While the aggressiveness of the Nasserist state to open up work for women was not matched by a serious attempt by the state to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code, feminists combined efforts to advance work for women with calls to ameliorate the family law.

The book suggests that the lack of reform of the Muslim Personal Status Code under the Nasser regime was related to “a tacit bargain between the state and the religious leaders” whereby the religious authorities got a free hand vis-à-vis family law. Many have understood the lack of reform appears to have come from the Nasserist state’s political disinterest in tampering with the law for it could extract compliance when it wished. When the Azhar religious establishment was brought under the firmer control of the state, the Nasser regime extracted the support of the religious authorities in key areas of interest to the state, such as family planning and, although Bier does not mention this, in extending suffrage rights to women (the state extracted from the religious authorities a fatwa legitimizing suffrage for women while previous official fatwas had pronounced the opposite). The right to vote, in any case, was of more symbolic than actual significance. It appeared that the state did not wish to disrupt the existing legal scaffolding of the family as a patriarchal...