Women’s nationalist activism on Sudan inverted gendered domestic roles among Egyptian men.

Evidence

So much had Sha`rawï come to personify the demands about the Sudan that a parliament member from the Nationalist Party, Fikri Abaza, sent a letter to the women’s newspaper al-Jins al-latïfa (The Gentle Sex) in the fall of 1924 in which he publicly remembered the times when “women thought of nothing but about new clothes,” while now they had begun to support the Sudan more than men did. He accused men of failing on this issue. Women followed every detail of the Sudan, worrying about the evils perpetrated in the Sudan, the prisons of the Sudan, leaving to men the “arrangements of the house.” Onto the men had fallen the tasks of laundry, cooking, and nursing the children. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 857

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sharing with anyone studying Egyptian feminism or gendered nationalism — the image of men doing laundry while women pursue imperial politics is memorable.
• SEED: An essay angle on how colonized nationalisms deploy gendered rhetoric about their own internal colonial possessions — women as more authentically nationalist than men toward Sudan.