Revolutionary Womanhood Summary

Laura Bier’s novel, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt, was published in 2011 and delves into feminism and state feminism during the Nasser era in Egypt. Bier analyzes the secular nationalist projects that emerged in the 1950’s and the myriad of events that led Egypt to reassess women’s role in Egypts society. The novel is split up into five main parts: the historical roots of State Feminism, the construction of the “working woman”, legal reform in personal status laws, regulating reproduction, and State feminism and the Third World. I believe that this was a strength of the novel because it provided an important timeline and overview of the most important moments and reasonings for some of the …show more content…
Bier analyzes the catalyst for the expansion of women into the workforce. The chapter explains how despite the fact that women’s actual participation in the workforce was generally low it was the ideological and symbolic work that these few women did that illustrated the strong state promotion of the new “working woman”. The few women that were in the workforce were imperative in demonstrating the states responsibilities and “claimed new responsibilities for ensuring both the inclusion and the regulation of women in the newly defined spaces of revolutionary public life” (p. 62). One of Bier’s main arguments from the second chapter is that the view that the home and the workplace as gendered and classed spaces and the emphasis on the need to modernize domestic spaces “not only reinforced the bourgeois home as a privileged location of gender difference but also provided solutions that were largely available only to middle-class women.” (p. 100). This is an important point to make because many of the privileges of state feminism under Nasser were only accessible to middle and upper class