ABSTRACT
This chapter sheds light on the gender issues and their impact on the spatial organisation and practice of homes. It looks at the process by which the changing position of women had driven the spatial transformation of house design from the traditional introvert courtyard-centred forms into vertically-organised extrovert arrangement. Women's position in society has been looked at as an indicator according to which the liberal values of modern societies were measured in a conservative region such as Egypt and the Middle East. As medieval culture and its social conventions were centred on the family and the position of women, the harem system, the reformers considered women as the principal issue for the reform movement. The reformers claimed that in order to attend to the requirements of modernity, Egyptians had to open their minds to the knowledge, scientific and philosophical progress of the west, and the indication of this was to accept women as equal members in a liberal society.
