Hoda Shaarawi Essay Example

EFU were concerned with education as well as social welfare, also social problems in Egypt, such as poverty, prostitution, illiteracy, and poor health conditions. Hoda sharawi was well known for her hard work and dedication. She accomplished allot in her life time at many levels, nationally and internationally. As the new member of the International Alliance of Women Hoda Shaarawi and the EFU joined forces in Rome with the international sisterhood to promote their own Egyptian nationalist-cum-feminist goals, specifically to lay claim to suffrage, and to help shape the transnational feminist movement.From the start the EFU showed itself adept at furthering Egyptian gender and national interests in the international feminist arena. The Egyptian feminists set the terms of their own debate and drew from deep within their own history and culture, and from their experiences as women, in formulating their feminism, contrary to those who paint it as a colonial imposition.

Over the years, from both within and outside the IAW, Egyptian feminists would persistently point to specific ways colonialism obstructed feminist goals.The Egyptians joined delegates coming from 43 countries. The Rome congress was the second since the end of the First World War and the largest ever IAW gathering. For the first time the IAW included members from eastern countries: Egypt, India, Japan, and an Ashkenazi Jewish women's organisation from Palestine (the Palestinian Arab Women's Union joined the IAW in 1935). The International Woman Suffrage Alliance had been founded at the beginning of the century when American and European feminists joined forces to accelerate their suffrage campaign.At the Rome congress the organisation changed its name to the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and

Equal Citizenship after women from the US and several European countries won the vote following the First World War.

The new name reflected the enlarged mandate the IAW set itself of continuing to support suffrage in countries where women still did not have the vote while also promoting the practice of equal citizenship.The EFU would argue strenuously over the years in this international feminist forum that in countries lacking full national sovereignty because of forms of colonial rule the IAW goal of full citizenship rights could never be achieved. This would be an uphill battle in an alliance that would not confront the elements of colonialism lodged within itself and tearing away at the weave of global sisterhood. At Rome, in her first ever speech to an IAW Congress, Hoda Shaarawi established the indigenous legitimacy of Egyptian women's rights.She was not claiming rights as legitimized in Western discourse or a universalist discourse. She evoked two well springs or "golden ages": the Pharaonic era and early Islam.

In Ancient Egypt women had enjoyed equal rights with men but when the country fell under foreign domination women lost those rights. When Islam came it granted women their rights but in time these had been eroded. Shaarawi made it clear (to the assembled forum while also sending a signal back home) that women were reclaiming their heritage (turath) and a restoration of lost rights. “ The Hidden Face of Eve By Nawal El Saadawi, Sherif Hetata”