May Her Likes Be Multiplied Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt by Marilyn Booth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 335 pages.)

Abstract

Marilyn Booth's remarkable study blends literary criticism with historical
research to better understand the construction of modem Egyptian womanhood.
Booth analyzes hundreds of women's biographies that were written
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and published in the
popular women's press. She situates this activity within the context of
Egypt's nationalist struggle and burgeoning feminist movement at a time of
foreign economic, military, and cultural domination. With the publication
of biographies of women as diverse as the Prophet's wives, Jeanne d'Arc,
Hatshepsut, Jane Austin, and Safiyya Zaghlul, Booth uncovers the diversi ty
of the Egyptian women's press in its scope and vision of what Egypt
should expect of its women.
Booth complicates our understandings of women's participation in the
public sphere by illuminating the ethnic and religious diversity of the
Egyptian women's press. She also delves deeply into the class issues motivating
the construction of the ideal Egyptian woman as a selfless member of
her family - both nuclear and national - conforming her domestic sphere to
the mold of communal, nationalist needs. Revealing women authors as both
shaping and being shaped by contemporary ideas of successful femininity,
Booth's study is perhaps the most potent analysis of Egyptian feminism published
in quite some time. It is an indispensable guide to a literature steeped
in the Arabic literary past as well as modem Egyptian society.
In a complex prologue, Booth argues that any examination of authorship
can only vaguely determine how audiences react to published texts.
Thus, although she sets out to analyze the messages inherent in women's
biographies, she cannot relay the manner in which the women's press was
received by its audience. Her book is an analysis of prescription through
example, but only can hint at the resulting impact. Booth focuses on how
these biographies became part of a larger social project to define women as
national symbols situating the nation as the ultimate community, all the
while maintaining patriarchal constructs in the home and other social
spheres. She declares the biographies she examines to be ultimately "feminist,"
for, although they often maintain crucial elements of the status ...