Nawal al-Sa'adawi and modern Egyptian feminist writings.

Influenced by the basic human rights movement in the West, and the independence and nationalism movements in Egypt in late nineteenth and twentieth century, women's issues in Egypt as well as other Arab countries, have become an important social concern and have been discussed frequently by both women writers and nationalists. An outspoken Egyptian nationalist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Qasim Amin, advocated the expansion of female activity outside the house and the removal of the veil for the modernization of the entire country. However, Amin's social reformist ideology under the new capitalist system limited women within the sexual division of labor and the patriarchal laws. Egyptian women writers see the liberation of women differently from the male nationalists, and are more concerned with educational, economic, social, and political rights, and reject the male control of women's destiny. An Egyptian writer, Nawal Sa$\\sp{\\rm c}$adawi, who has been an active writer since the 60s, explores the female experience in Egyptian, society both in her fiction and non-fiction works. Sa$\\sp{\\rm c}$adawi sees sexism as the fundamental social problem, and imperialism, racism, and capitalism as the extension of male supremacy over women, and the existing ideologies as all products of male supremacist culture. Influenced by socialist feminism, Sa$\\sp{\\rm c}$adawi views the oppression of women as based on the material differences of society and not on innate physiological or psychological relations between women and men. Sa$\\sp{\\rm c}$adawi believes that it was the accumulation of material and the development of private property that changed the economic pattern of society. Consequently, Sa$\\sp{\\rm c}$adawi urges that the power of the totalitarian government and Islamic institutions are to be discontinued, and a socialist country is to be established.PhDMiddle Eastern literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161960/1/8821634.pd