educational policy where the approach was less
gendered and less restrictive. It is best described by
the three public schools that catered to the educa-
tional needs of young girls before 1882 and the
changes that they had to endure under British con-
trol. The oldest of these schools was for midwives
and was established in 1832. At the beginning, it
had difficulty recruiting students, but eventually it
attracted many working-class girls who upon grad-
uation were employed by the state in the different
provinces (Kuhnke 1990). In 1888, the school was
transformed into a British-style nursing school in
which students were trained to be helpers of male
physicians who from then on monopolized the
study and the practice of obstetrics to which the
early graduates had access (Mahfouz 1935,
75–76). The other two public schools located in
Cairo, al-Suyufiyya (1873) and Qurabiyya (1875),
provided general education for girls. In the 1880s,
the two schools were combined into one as al-
Madrasa al-Saniyya in 1889 with a curriculum that
reflected the new emphasis on domestic sciences.
The first graduates of al-Saniyya, who included the
feminist writer Malak £ifnìNàsif and the distin-
guished educator Nabawiyya Mùsà, went on to
train at the Teachers’ College in 1901 and eventu-
ally worked as teachers at schools for girls (Kamal
2001, 179). Even though private primary educa-
tion for girls continued to expand during the first
two decades of the twentieth century, the establish-
ment of preparatory and secondary school educa-
tion for girls had to wait for Egyptian formal
independence in 1923.
The rudimentary colonial view of girls’ edu-
cation was shared by Egyptian nationalists and
modernists who claimed to be supporters of the lib-
eration of women. Among them was judge Qàsim
Amìn, who with other Egyptian nationalists such
as Sa≠d Zaghlùl, the Egyptian minister of education
in 1906, worked closely with the British consul,
Lord Cromer. Amìn apologetically defended Islamic
gender practices in response to the Orientalist
attack by Duc d’Harcourt’s L’Egypte and les Egyp-
tiens(1894) and then used his book Ta™rìr al-mar±a
(The liberation of women), published in 1899, to
reiterate the negative Orientalist representations of
Islamic society and to blame Muslim women for
its backwardness (Hatem 2002, 17–21). Unfortu-
nately, the title of the book, its call for the abolition
of the veil, and the attack launched against it by
Muslim conservatives led most readers and ana-
lysts to assume that it had a progressive message.
Recent analyses have moved beyond this superficial
view to criticize Amìn’s embrace of the colonial
views of Lord Cromer (Ahmed 1992, 155–57) and
egypt 67the assumptions and categories of the Orientalist
discourse (Hatem 2002, 17–21).
The colonial government had hoped that its abo-
lition of corvée labor and the downsizing of the
draft system would make it popular among the peas-
ant classes. In fact, peasant men and women con-
tinued to view British soldiers in their midst with
hostility (Tucker 1985, 145–6), culminating in the
outbreak of violence in Dinshway (1907) where
soldiers shooting pigeons accidentally shot a peasant
woman and set fire to a barn, causing the peasants
to attack them. In response, the colonial govern-
ment whipped and executed the peasants involved.
The new colonial economy, which relied on the
presence of a large landowning class and their sup-
port, did not improve the economic conditions of
the peasant majority. Their plight was ignored by
the modernist nationalist intellectuals of the early
period who either maintained friendly relations
with the Egyptian landed classes or were them-
selves members of that class. For example, Qàsim
Amìn presented a simultaneously romantic and
condescending view of peasant women and men in
his writings. He argued that unlike the urban well-
to-do women who were unproductive and did not
share their husbands’ education, peasant women
were the economic partners of their husbands and
shared their level of knowledge. In his view, peasant
men and women led a “naive Beduin-like existence
where the needs of the family were limited” (Amìn
1984, 32, 42).
The romanticization of the work of rural women
overlooked their poverty and limited the satisfac-
tion of their many needs. During the early part of
the twentieth century, urban poor women faced
equally difficult work conditions in the markets
and in cigarette factories (Sàlim 1984, 20). These
conditions of work differed markedly from those
facing middle-class women who developed an
interest in public work in the first decade of the
twentieth century. Their education provided them
with better material, if not social, conditions as the
memoirs of Nabawiyya Mùsàsuggest. It was
understood that working middle-class women had
to leave their jobs once they were married. Malak
£ifni Nàsif, one of the first graduates of al-Saniyya
school, ended her teaching career when she married
the notable ≠Abd al-Sattàr al-Bàsil bek. More atyp-
ical was Nabawiyya Mùsà, the prominent educa-
tor, who chose not to marry and had a long career
teaching first in public schools and then in her own
private schools.
While Mùsàsupported women’s right to educ-
ation and work in her writings, Nàsif developed
the earliest and most powerful critique of the