Creative women in changing societies: a personal reflection

Abstract

Nawal El Sadaawi was born in the village of Kafr Tahla, on the banks of the Nile. Refusing to accept the limitations that both religious and colonial oppression imposed on women of rural origin, Nawal qualified as a doctor and rose to be Egypt's Director of Public Health. Since she first began writing twenty-five years ago, her books (six novels and five collections of short stories) have concentrated on women. It was her campaigning as a doctor, a creative writer and a feminist that brought her into conflict with the Egyptian authorities. She was the first Arab woman to denounce female circumcision and other similar practices in her first non-fiction work, Woman and Sex, published in 1972. This evoked such antagonism from the political and religious authorities that she was deprived of her job as Director of Health Education and the right to publish the magazine, Health. Undeterred, she followed this book with four others on similar themes (all in Arabic): Female is the Origin, Women and Neurosis, Man and Sex and The Naked Face of Women in the Arab World. The first work to be published in English is The Hidden Face of Eve: women in the Arab world (London, Zed Press, 1980).

Race & Class talked to Nawal in London when she was reflecting on the ways her views were being treated in the West, and our interview with her is published in the next section. The article which follows is an edited version of a paper delivered at the UNITAR Seminar on 'Creative women in changing societies', held in Oslo, 9-13 July 1980.