ABSTRACT
In her final days, Doria Shafik would write the following poem: “My name begins with a D/and I am a woman … Daughter of the Nile/I have demanded women’s rights/My fight was enlarged to human freedom/And what was the result?/I have no more friends/So what?/Until the end of the road/I will proceed alone.” The poem is a lamentation of a life lost and the lack of acknowledgement of her successes. In 1957, after she denounced Gamal Abdel Nasser as a “dictator,” Nasser retaliated by putting her under house arrest and shutting down her journal, Bint Al-Nil, which Shafik had used to critique the oppression of women in Egypt. In shutting down the journal, and putting Shafik under house arrest, Nasser ensured that this woman who had fought for equal rights for women in Egypt would be silenced. This chapter reconstructs to the development of Doria Shafik’s political ideas and intellectual project, and shows that her political intervention and activism cannot be understood outside of her personal biography. Without this background, her radicalism and her work as a feminist would have taken a different form. Because of this entanglement between her personal history and political ideas, Doria became not only a symbol of feminist struggle in the 1940s and 1950s, but also the target of the Egyptian government. Doria has mostly been consigned to historical footnotes, yet she is one of the most influential women/feminists in Northern Africa and in the Arab world. This chapter shows the potential of biography writing as an act of remembrance.
