British rulers used girls’ schooling to justify blocking Egyptian self-government.

Evidence

Lord Cromer considered the seclusion of Muslim women and their lack of education a major obstacle to Egyptian self-government.As a result, British efforts to establish schools for girls were central to the empire’s civilizing mission in Egypt. A Frencheducated Egyptian lawyer named Qäsim Amïn published Tahrïr al-mar´a (The Liberation of Women) in 1899, a revolutionary book at the time that advocated education for women and equated women’s low social status with the status of the Egyptian nation. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior article on ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — colonial dress and gender regulation as civilizing-mission rhetoric; also to the ADDENDUM theme of moral-panic-as-class-signaling.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: was Qasim Amin’s 1899 treatise genuinely pro-indigenous Egyptian or itself a colonial collaborative text? Fascinating tension between a native Egyptian lawyer and the British girl-school agenda.