Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces ─ Writing Feminist History Through Biography in Fin-De-Siecle Egypt

Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) was a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women's lives,al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: Classes of ladies of cloistered spaces,1893-6) - featuring Boudicca, Catherine the Great, Zaynab (granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad), Victoria Woodhull, the Turkish poet Sirri Hanim and many others - built on the Arabic-Islamic biographical tradition to produce a work for women in the modern era, grafting European, Turkish, Arab and Indian life narratives, amongst others, onto Arabic literary patterns.

In Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces Marilyn Booth argues that Fawwaz's work was less 'exemplary biography' than feminist history, in its exploration of achievement but also of what Booth labels patriarchal trauma in the lives of women across times and places. She traces Fawwaz's creative use of her sources, her presentation of biographical narratives in the context of the political essays she wrote in the Arabic press, her publicised dialogue with the President of the Board of Lady Managers of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition - where she attempted to send the volume - and how her inscription of a feminine ancient history diverged from that of men writing history in 1890s Egypt.

Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Edinburgh. She has previously editedHarem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (2010), and a Journal of Women's History issue, 'Women's autobiography in the Middle East and South Asia' (2013). She is Middle East/Europe editor of, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.