Beth Baron

In the decades leading up to the 1919 Egyptian revolution, stirrings were taking place. Publications after publication were being churned out advocating for a voice from an often silent population: women. One after another, each one sought out a larger place in society for Egyptian women. Beth Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt shines a light on this unremembered and culturally rich movement. Her study shows that it was not just the men who were fighting for independence, and that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

This is a history in two parts: the first lays out the history and the consumption of these new publications, and the second looks to analyze their integration into the culture of early 20th century Egypt. These were journals written by women for women, and while each one didn’t last for very long, there was always another one to takes it place. From 1892 to 1920, these journals were a way for Egyptian women to interact with both each other and the culture at large. The spread of “new” ideas, such as companionate marriages and social reform, is seen here as a sort of revolution within a revolution.

Baron’s writing is scholarly and slightly dense, but there is a wealth of Egyptian social, cultural, and political history here. If you are already versed, then you get a little more depth; if not, then you get a whole lot of information. This perspective of the Egyptian revolution bears reading, if only to reinforce that historical events often have a multitude of perspectives. A deep and interesting book.… (más)

In The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press, Beth Baron is concerned with the role that journals owned, produced, and consumed by middle-class and upper-middle-class women in Egypt between 1882 and 1919 played in shaping debate about women’s rights and facilitating changes in those rights.

Her study is motivated by a concern that women’s voices have been overshadowed by men’s voices in the discussion of Egyptian proto-feminist movements, leading to the misperception that these movements were primarily the work of men.

In the first half of her work, she generally ignores the substantive content of the periodical press and focuses instead on reconstructing the literary and cultural milieu in which these periodicals were issued. She provides extensive biographical information regarding the founders of prominent women’s periodicals, discussing how educational opportunities, cultural norms, and political developments shaped the entry of women into the periodical press.

The second half of her study contains a more systematic analysis of the positions taken by women’s periodicals on crucial issues, including women’s human rights, marriage and the family, and education and employment. In this portion, Baron attempts to draw connections between the debates taking place in the press and real change taking place in women’s lives. She concludes with an examination on women’s associations, viewing them as both an alternative to women’s involvement in the workplace and the logical outgrowth of the activist spirit expressed in the press. Baron’s inquiry shows that there were in fact a significant number of female intellectuals – although she admits that the women under examination would not have identified themselves using this term – espousing a diverse range of perspectives on the question of improving the conditions of women in Egypt. She argues that ‘these female thinkers established agendas for reform and programs of action for the twentieth century.”

Baron uses two factors regarding the publication of the women’s journals (al-majallat al-nisa‘iyya) in support of her assertion that women played an active role in discussions about women’s rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

First, although many of these journals were short-lived, new journals constantly took the place of those that ceased publication, suggesting a continual interest in these types of publications. Second, an increasingly diverse group of women was becoming involved in the women’s press on both the supply and the demand sides, suggesting that the market for literature specifically directed at women was expanding to encompass women of various religious and political leanings.

While the journals were certainly important in spreading new ideas about modern household management and the ideals of monogamous, companionate marriage amongst their middle-class female readership, Baron’s assertion that changes in British colonial policies regarding the education of women can be linked to the influence of the women’s journals is more problematic. Other than stating that the changes in curriculum mirrored the demands made by some women’s journals, Baron presents no indication that the British were so influenced, therefore, her statement seems an overreach.

This book makes a very interesting comparison with Camron Amin’s The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture: 1865-1946, as each relies heavily on material gathered from these periodicals in their examination of women’s reform movements in Egypt and Iran, respectively. However, each author uses the periodical press in a distinct way and presents a different perspective on the nature of ‘women’s awakening’ in the Middle East. Baron adopts an institutional perspective, examining the processes by which women’s periodicals were created and distributed within Egypt and attempting to assess the historical importance of these periodicals. Her emphasis on the female producers and consumers of the press reveals that Egyptian women played an active and central role in shaping the emerging discourse of women’s rights. Amin concentrates instead on the substance of the debates regarding the ‘modern Iranian woman’ conducted in the press between by (male) intellectuals and state and shows the power of the state to implement its decisions on its citizens. Iranian women are present mostly as objects of a reform process beyond their control.

What is particularly interesting, given the different emphasis in each work, is that the aims and rhetoric of the reform movements in Egypt and Iran were often quite similar. Reformers in both countries stressed the essential connections between women, the family, and the nation. Although Egyptian and Iranian women gained new opportunities and rights with respect to education, family life, marriage, and employment, their progress was not a goal in itself. Rather it was simply a tool that enabled women to be more effective wives, mothers, and citizens, supporting the men and boys who did the work of nation-building. Baron’s comment that reformers did not seek to radically redraw the boundaries of gender relations but rather simply to “improve women’s half of the bargain” is as true for Iran as it is for Egypt. As a consequence, the scope of their education was quite limited. Women’s periodicals in both Egypt and Iran emphasized topics such as child-rearing, domestic sciences, and morals education. The women’s press in Egypt and the Pahlavi state in Iran both tried to create new mental links between learning and piety in order to overcome the stigma associated with modern, often Western-style education. Wage work outside the home was essentially a non-starter for middle-class Egyptian women in the period under consideration. In mid-20th century Iran, women received training that prepared them for employment outside the house but limited them to professions that were ‘appropriate,’ such as nursing, teaching, and gynecology. Finally, while Baron’s study of Egypt can be viewed as an examination of ‘bottom-up’ reform and Amin’s study of Iran as an examination of ‘top-down’ reform, the processes at work in both countries are remarkably similar. In both Egypt and Iran, reforms implemented by an authoritarian regime met with a degree of success amongst a certain elite strata of the population because these reforms had previously been debated in the periodical press by both men and women.… (más)