Scan barcode
A review by fyoosha
The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World by Nawal El Saadawi
3.0
Nawal El Saadawi is a controversial Egyptian feminist who, according to my family, is best known for her opposition to the veil, her willingness to talk openly of sex and women's sexual pleasure, and her insistence on treating Islam - and all religions - objectively. I picked this book up mainly because I was curious to see just what it was about Nawal El Saadawi that prompted my relatively liberal Egyptian family members to call her crazy. As it turns out, nothing at all; my family is just pretty conservative by American standards.
Perspective is such an interesting thing. I've been immersing myself in hardcore feminist and socialist literature for years now, and so this book, to me, felt very rudimentary. It very much has the hallmarks of classic second-wave feminism in that it's very melodramatic (I lost count of how many times El Saadawi referred to women as slaves) and relies heavily on a gender binary. That said, when I remember that this book was originally published in Egypt in 1977, I can imagine what an absolute shock it must have been to the general population; the ideas presented here must have seemed so radical as to be absolutely insane.
As it is, I didn't really learn anything from here that I didn't already know, except for the solidification of some Marxist-Feminist theories I'd only brushed over in college, such as El Saadawi's assertion that patriarchy is inexplicably linked to economics, lineages, and inheritance laws, and that women's liberation can only come with true socialism and the abolition of class. I was actually kind of surprised to see El Saadawi's heavy criticism of capitalist structures, since that's never really something I'd ever heard associated with her, but it figures that her detractors wouldn't talk about that.
My only other criticism of the book is that it's rather repetitious; El Saadawi returns to the same ideas over and over again, to the point where I think the content of this book might have just as easily been summarized in one long, cohesive essay.
Perspective is such an interesting thing. I've been immersing myself in hardcore feminist and socialist literature for years now, and so this book, to me, felt very rudimentary. It very much has the hallmarks of classic second-wave feminism in that it's very melodramatic (I lost count of how many times El Saadawi referred to women as slaves) and relies heavily on a gender binary. That said, when I remember that this book was originally published in Egypt in 1977, I can imagine what an absolute shock it must have been to the general population; the ideas presented here must have seemed so radical as to be absolutely insane.
As it is, I didn't really learn anything from here that I didn't already know, except for the solidification of some Marxist-Feminist theories I'd only brushed over in college, such as El Saadawi's assertion that patriarchy is inexplicably linked to economics, lineages, and inheritance laws, and that women's liberation can only come with true socialism and the abolition of class. I was actually kind of surprised to see El Saadawi's heavy criticism of capitalist structures, since that's never really something I'd ever heard associated with her, but it figures that her detractors wouldn't talk about that.
My only other criticism of the book is that it's rather repetitious; El Saadawi returns to the same ideas over and over again, to the point where I think the content of this book might have just as easily been summarized in one long, cohesive essay.