Remembering Nawal El-Saadawi
- themidnightmagazin
- Apr 30, 2021
- 2 min read
By Nahid Moradi
Celebrating an Egyptian Feminist Icon
Nawal El-Saadawi was born in Kafr-Tahla, a small village in Egypt, on October 27, 1931. El-Saadawi was an author, physician, psychiatrist, and women's rights activist who devoted a large part of her life and career to promoting women's political and sexual rights in Egypt and around the world.
El-Saadawi was familiar with the Egyptian culture’s suppression of female freedom and sexuality, as she went through genital mutilation at the age of six and was expected to marry at the age of ten. Despite her family’s conservative traditions, El-Saadawi was allowed an education, and her father taught her to always speak her mind and fight for her freedom.
El-Saadawi studied medicine at Cairo University and received her medical degree in 1955, after which she worked as a doctor in her hometown. She took notes on women's physical and psychological problems while working as a doctor and related them to repressive cultural and patriarchal traditions. Many of these observations were incorporated into her first book published in 1972, Women and Sex. The work was a foundational text to the feminist movement, shedding light on various aggressions against women's bodies including female circumcision.
El-Saadawi worked at The Faculty of Medicine at Ain Sham University, conducting research on women and neurosis. During this period, she met a doctor employed at Qanatir Prison who told her about a female inmate who became the inspiration for El-Saadawi's 1975 novel, Woman at Point Zero. President Anwar Sadat (1970-1981), sentenced El-Saadawi to Qanatir Prison as a punishment for publishing a feminist magazine in 1981. She used a smuggled makeup pencil to write Memoirs from the Women's Prison on a roll of toilet paper while incarcerated. El-Saadawi was released from prison shortly after Sadat was assassinated. Despite the backlash and criticism she has faced in Egypt, El-Saadawi is honoured worldwide and won countless honours and awards for her activism.
She passed on March 21, 2021, in Cairo. The legacy Nawal El-Saadawi left behind was an extensive one that should be celebrated and recognized, as she had paved the way for feminism and women’s bodily and societal autonomy within a patriarchal society.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Nawal El Saadawi". Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nawal-El-Saadawi. Accessed 16 April 2021.
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