Elite Egyptian women resisted their own liberation because it threatened their sense of superiority

Evidence

“How many times did we hear then women denying the issues and principles about which Qäsim Amïn wrote, despite the fact that these principles were for their betterment, because to recognize that would have meant recognizing their own powerlessness and this would have injured their arrogance. They reminded me of slave women who, when presented with their manumission papers, would cry for their past lives of obedience and imprisonment.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 854

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism — beneficiaries of a hierarchy refusing reforms that would dismantle it — echoes the complaisance arguments in Things Fall Apart and connects to how nationalists benefited from slavery while opposing British colonialism. — connects to: Women’s resigned prudence made them obstacles to their own class emancipation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1744