parliament; currently they comprise only 2.5% of all MPs in the country. Marriage and divorce laws, which customarily "favored the social position of men" (Library), have been particularly vexed, even though women have figured into efforts by indigenous Egyptians to encourage nation-state independence vis-à-vis the West.
Thus if women's status has improved in modern Egypt, it nevertheless is plainly subordinate to that of Egyptian men, and it remains in constant tension with the strands of profoundly conservative religious, political, and social views associated with Islamism. That is the subject of this research.
Al-Ali (87ff) identifies evidence of tension between feminism as a discrete concept and the varieties of Arab nationalism that emerged over the course of the 20th-century transition of the Middle East into a postcolonial geopolitical structure. The question of whether women should have an autonomous sociopolitical purpose in the public, political sphere or subsume their interests under a nationalist program when domestic Egyptian life is so attached to patriarchal norms is the core of women activists' concerns. Al-Ali suggests that to create a dichotomy between the progressive secular sphere and Islamism is to oversimplify, or "westernize" the discourse of women's position in Egypt. However, Al-Ali (25) also cites "the divided loyalties, interests, and contradictions . . . of secular-oriented women activists in Egypt."
There is compelling evidence that, from the point of view of anticolonialist Egyptian activists who worked with middle-class Egyptian women against the Condominium and the pervasive western imperialist presence in the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century, the women were seen as instrumental to the independence project but not as essential to its success. In any case, their independent agenda was not given primary importance once the British had been obliged to leave the Suez. Booth argue...