Huda Shaarawi was a pioneering Egyptian feminist leader and founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union.
Shaarawi was born in 1879 in Al-Minya, Egypt, and was the daughter of Muhammad Sultan, the first president of the Egyptian Representative Council. When she was 5, her father died and she realised that her status as his oldest child meant nothing, as she was female. Shaarawi was frustrated by this, along with the fact that she was able to recite passages from the Holy Qur’an, but could not understand them due to a lack of education because of her gender. She then shunned education until the poet Sayyida Khadijah al-Maghribiyya visited her household and showed her that it was possible for women to converse with men at an equal level intellectually. Sayyida Khadijah showed her that education could be the key to gender equality, and she threw herself into literature.
At the age of 11, Shaarawi was forced into the harem structure, where girls and women were kept secluded from male company in a separate section of the household called the harem. They were also expected to be veiled, both inside and outside the household. Shaarawi’s frustration at the way she was being treated because of her gender continued to grow. At 13, she was forced to marry an older cousin, Ali Shaarawi. As part of the marriage contract, he had to agree to leave his slave-concubine wife but a year later, she was pregnant. This enabled Shaarawi to return home, where she was able to focus on her education. During this time, she met Eugénie le Brun, who first suggested to her that the veil was holding back Egyptian women.
In 1900, Shaarawi returned to her husband and for a few years she devoted herself to her two children. In 1908, she became involved in activism when founding the first philanthropic society run by Egyptian women, where they offered services for poor women and children. Two years later, she opened a school for girls which focused on academic subjects, rather than midwiferey as was expected. Shaarawi organised lectures for women in Egypt at a time when women’s movements were gathering strength around the world, including the fight for women’s suffrage. In 1914, she formed the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women.
In 1919, following World War I, Shaarawi and her husband joined the Wafd party, an organisation aimed at gaining independence from Great Britain. organised the largest anti-British demonstration involving women. Egyptian women came out on to the streets at an unprecedented scale to show solidarity and nationalist protest against the colonial existence. Shaarawi was then elected head of the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee in 1920. It was the first political organisation for Egyptian women. Two years later, Shaarawi led an economic boycott against the British, which was later credited as one of the most powerful weapons in the fight for indolence, which was announced in 1923. The women who had been fighting for that same independence were expected to simply go back to their harems, and the new constitution denied women the right to vote. Shaarawi left the Wafdist party in protest, and formed the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), which fought for women’s suffrage and education and published l’Egyptienne (el-Masreyya), a feminist magazine which advocated for Egyptian women’s rights, and was the first of its kind in Egypt. That same year, Shaarawi removed her face veil in public, becoming a figurehead of the Egyptian feminist movement and inspiring others to do the same.
Under her leadership, the EFU ran a dispensary for women and children and fought for a range of issues including: the raising of the minimum marriage age from 13; women’s suffrage; restriction of polygamy, stricter divorce laws for men and to expand the opportunity for girls to access education. By 1930, they had succeeded in getting Egyptian universities to admit their first female student. Shaarawi was also a member of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, and became the founding president of the Arab Feminist Union in 1945. That same year, she was awarded the Nishin al-Karmal award for her contribution to the fight for Egypt’s independence. In her role as leader of the EFU, Shaarawi represented Egypt at women’s congresses in Graz, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Marseilles, Istanbul, Brussels, Budapest,Copenhagen, Interlaken, and Geneva.
In 1947, after Shaarawi’s death, the EFU became the Shaarawi Society for the Feminist Renaissance to honour her work. In addition to her activism, Shaarawi also wrote the memoir Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, which gave an insight into what life was like within the harem structure. Within her lifetime, Shaarawi worked tirelessly to provide women and girls with greater opportunities, and felt that women-run social service projects would be able to both widen the horizons of women, and challenge the view that women need protection and should be thought of as far more than just “creatures of pleasure” by men.