Egyptian history fondly notes its massive man-made pyramids and the great sphinx. However, significant events like the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 are not common knowledge. The revolution was a nationwide uprising against British rule in Egypt and Sudan.
This is where Huda Sha’arawi, a revolutionary and activist, played a crucial role in insisting that women would not be relegated to the homes or to harems.
Huda was born to the illustrious Egyptian Sha’arawi family in the Upper Egyptian city of Minya as Nour Al-Huda Mohamed Sultan Shaarawi. She was Muhamed Sultan Pasha Shaarawi’s (the latter president of Egypt’s Chamber of Deputies) daughter. Iqbal Hanim, her mother, was of Circassian ancestry.
Along with her brothers, Huda began her education at a young age, taking classes in grammar and calligraphy in several other languages. She was raised in a wealthy neighborhood, In Cairo and spent her formative years there. After her father passed away, Ali Shaarawi, her elder cousin, took custody of her and later married her when she was 13.
The 1919 Egyptian Revolution, spurred by women, called for the release of male nationalist leaders and Egyptian independence from Britain.
Huda and other members of the female Egyptian elite led the crowds of protesters, while rural and working-class women assisted and joined male activists in the street demonstrations. While serving as the Wafd’s acting vice president during the revolution, Huda worked alongside her husband; Pasha Huda kept her updated so she could step in if he or other Wafd members were detained.
Following the 1919 protests, the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee (WWCC), a group affiliated with Wafd, was established on January 12 of that year. Several of the women who took part in the protests joined the committee, and Huda was chosen as the nation’s first leader.
The Eastern Women’s Conference for the Defense of Palestine was sponsored by Huda and the EFU in Cairo in 1938, placing a higher priority on nationalist than feminist concerns. She was awarded the Order of Virtues in 1945. She considered the confinement of women to the home or harem in Egypt at the time to be a highly archaic system.
Such limitations on women’s movements infuriated Huda, who as a result began planning lectures for women on subjects that interested them. For the first time, this allowed many women to leave their houses and into the public realm, and Huda was able to persuade them to assist her in starting a women’s welfare association to raise money for Egypt’s underprivileged women. Huda created a school for girls in 1910, putting more of an emphasis on academic subjects than practical ones like midwifery.
After her spouse passed away in 1922, decided to quit donning the traditional headscarf. Shortly after leaving the International Woman, She removed her veil and shawl at the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome, a significant moment in Egyptian feminism history. Women who came to greet her were initially horrified, but as they began to applaud, some of them took off their mantles and veils.
According to Dania Akkid in a 2012 essay, Egyptian Women in the 1919 Revolution: Political Awakening to Nationalist Feminism:
“The foiled legacy of Huda Shaarawi, who launched the Egyptian feminist movement a year later by publicly removing her veil, now continues into the 21st century. Those who followed the 2011 revolution on their TV screens will remember how women played a prominent part in the mass demonstrations, not least of all on Cairo’s Tahrir Square.”
Following Huda’s act of rebellion, many Egyptian women quit donning veils and mantles within a decade, doing so for many years until a retrograde movement took place. Sharawi was the founding president of the Arab Feminist Union in 1945 and served as president of the Egyptian Feminist Union for the remainder of her life.
Under her direction, the Arab Feminist Union and Egyptian Feminist Union both began their publications, Al-Marah al-Arabiyyah (“The Arab Woman”) in 1946 and L’Égyptienne (later Al-Misriyyah), in 1925. Her memoir, Mudhakkirt, published in 1986 as Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, details her upbringing in a Cairo harem.
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