| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Beth Baron. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 287. $55.00.
This engagingly written book traces gendered iconography and women's nationalist activism in post–World War I Egypt. Correlations between feminized iconographies of nation and (representations of) women's activism were complex, given gender's centrality to nationalist articulations and groupings. As in many postcolonial nationalisms, an abiding point of contestation between nationalists and imperialists was where, on modernity's thermometer, the mercury stopped when it came to women's status. Did Egyptians treat "their women" well enough to merit a place on the homosocial global stage of national political autonomy? That women aspired to walk onto the political stage complicated matters.	1
Part one of Beth Baron's book argues that particular kinship metaphors emerged in the nineteenth century as family definitions shifted, offering scaffolding for the metaphorization of territory-as-woman, which Baron then explores through discussions of caricature, monumental sculpture, and photography. The first chapter rehearses existing scholarship on the end of the harem system and elite transformations as connected to a forming idiom of nationalism. Baron is not the first to speak of a "perceived crisis of the family at the turn of the century" (p. 17), yet no one has investigated whether a few elite writers' warnings are borne out by demographics. Did slavery's (slow) end entail much more than a tempest in a tiny elite teacup? If this was the elite kernel that spearheaded nationalism, it remains unclear what the real contribution of the gradual dismantling of "harem" (itself a variable set of practices and understandings) was to nationalism or gender politics. More convincingly, Baron argues that familial metaphors allowed disparate (but privileged) elements of the nation to construct a unified national narrative with affective power and hierarchical authority.	2
Baron traces how these familial metaphors and gendered constructions of "the nation" play out in visual iconography. Although she promises to analyze "literary discourses," her discussion focuses on visual spheres. Through cartoons and photographs, painting and sculpture, she finds the nation's central representative persona shifting from peasant woman to (elite) pharoanic woman and on to the modern new woman and the young girl, linking these representational changes to broader conceptual and ideological shifts and changes in some women's educational and economic statuses. One could complicate this trajectory by analyzing images more fully alongside verbal texts: how did the imagery of the peasant woman as Egypt intersect with nationalist polemics on the peasantry or feminist uses of "the peasant woman" as verbal icon in arguing for women's rights to work? Were editors not only finding resonant ways to represent the nation (maternal, fecund, historically rooted, helpless, naïfive), but also responding subtly to emerging discourses on women as autonomous political actors?	3
Part two offers the book's original contribution, charting women's political activities and memories of them in strong chapters on the 1919 elite women's nationalist demonstrations and Safiyya Zaghlul, spouse of nationalist leader Sa'd Zaghlul. In 1919, women entered public politics spurred by collective and individual nationalist sentiments. But it was as symbols of anti-imperialist mass popular protest, not as political actors, that they were remembered. Tracing the archival record, Baron finds discrepancies between a likely reconstruction of events and the dominant national/ist memory of them. Certain dramatic moments became part of public memory; others, that might emphasize women's autonomous political acts, receded. Similarly, Safiyya Zaghlul—whose husband was exiled in 1919—was a central force in nationalist politics, but in representation, her political role was subsumed in a maternal idiom, partly due to Zaghlul's able manipulation of her public image. Here and elsewhere, Baron provides good analysis of the ways women's changing dress practices were both evident in visual representation and constitutive of it.	. . .

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