Nawal El Saadawi

Saadawi was born the second of nine children, to a family that was progressive, yet slave to certain traditions. At six years old, her father had her circumcised yet also provided her an education and encouraged her to think and speak forthrightly. Both of Sadaawi’s parents died early, leaving her as the sole guardian for her younger siblings. Saadawi studied in Cairo, where she graduated as a doctor in 1955. As a physician, she realized that many women’s physical and psychological ills were rooted in class oppression and gendered oppression. After two brief marriages, she married a prominent communist activist in 1964, whom had previously spent 13 years as a political prisoner. In 1972, while working as a public health director and editor of a prominent health journal, Saadawi published Women and Sex, which catalogued the various ways that patriarchal society dominates women and violates their personal agency. Although the controversial feminist book was widely successful in Egypt and abroad, it cost Saadawi both her directorship and the journal. Saadawi then transitioned to researching women’s neurosis for a prominent medical university, and then served as an adviser for the United Nations. During this time, she wrote and published Woman at Point Zero based upon meeting Firdaus as a part of Saadawi’s case studies of women at Qanatir Prison. In 1981, Saadawi helped launch the feminist magazine Confrontation, which led President Anwar Sadat—who had already considered Saadawi a dangerous public figure—to order Saadawi’s arrest. She spent one year in Qanatir Prison—the same prison she wrote about in Woman at Point Zero in 1975—but was released after military officers assassinated Sadat. Saadawi continued her activism in Egypt until 1988, until Islamists threatened her life. She took sanctuary in the U.S., teaching at several prestigious universities until she could return to Egypt in 1996. Back in her home country, Saadawi continued her activism. She ran for president in 2005, protested in Tahrir Square in 2011—an event which triggered the Egyptian Revolution and downfall of President Hosni Mubarak—and campaigned for the secularization of public education in Egypt. Saadawi has two children, and divorced her third husband in 2010.