7. From Sober To Salacious

Women's Biography as Spectacle

She stands out as one of the most able and skilled of Eastern women, one of those refined, educated women who manage their duties excellently and handle their affairs with wisdom and vision. Moreover, she is one of those who take in their stride the advances of the age, to the extent that these suit Eastern customs and do not transgress sacred religious principles.

And thus did death put an end to the evils of Mata Hari, the dancer who infatuated thousands.

On January 26, 1927, The Bride carried three pictures under its masthead. The largest showed the prince of Wales offering a farewell kiss to his brother's wife. To the side appeared two faces, the first belonging to the “leader of the women's awakening in Persia, Zuhra Hānim Haydār.” Ira-nian women had been hugely influential in their country's “modern awakening,” explained the caption. They were “distinguished by their dedication to their nation and great desire to acquire learning, so that you even find among village women those who compose poetry and discuss philosophy on the basis of knowledge and reading.” The caption below the lower photograph was quite different. “This is not a portrait of a pretty actress,” announced the magazine, “but of a thief, a highway robber and famous murderer. Her name is Rebecca Bradley, and she was recently arrested in America as she stormed a bank.”^[1] The masthead carried the description The Bride had borne since its 1925 founding: “Al-‘‘Aruūsa is a magazine of entertainment, literature, science, and history, featuring photographs of contemporary events and famous ladies of the world, published weekly by Iskandar Makāriyūs.”

The family names of magazine proprietors were not changing as quickly as were magazines themselves. A contemporary of the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, and Young Woman of the East in its later years, The Bride signaled the presence of a new sort of face on the journalistic scene. Since the late nineteenth century, readers and listeners in Egypt had enjoyed many satirical-colloquial periodicals, and some had featured caricatures of politicians. But the illustrated weekly of news and entertainment was just emerging, soon to be joined by magazines that specialized in theater, radio, and film. That women were important as magazine consumers is attested by The Bride's focus and longevity. It survived as a weekly magazine into the early days of World War II, when rising costs and paper shortages drastically curtailed popular periodical production.

And that “Famous Women” continued to be important to this type of magazine was signaled by their inclusion as part of the periodical's mission. But now it was “portraits” rather than “biographies” that were prominent. Before the turn of the century, sketched portraits had accompanied biographies of women intermittently. Women's magazines of the early 1920s did start to publish photographs of Egyptian and Syrian, aswell as European and American, women, although complaints from editors suggest that many women were reluctant to provide their likenesses. The Egyptian Woman's Magazine, describing American traveler Grace Seton's interview with Safiyya Zaghlūl, observed that Zaghlūl had given Seton special permission to photograph her. “For honorable Muslim women to this day do not permit their portraits to be published.”^[2] This was in late 1924, a few months before The Bride's first issue. Eighteen months later, Balsam ‘‘Abd al-Malik published a family portrait—of herself, husband, and two daughters—explaining that “a group of the magazine's readers requested that we publish a portrait of our daughters, and in compliance we publish this family portrait for the first and final time.”^[3] But photographs in the early years of this magazine were rare, perhaps for reasons of cost as much as modesty. The EFU's French-language magazine, L'Egyptienne, had the financial backing of Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, and, as Badran notes, it was “not inexpensive” for the time. Perhaps this was as important as its feminist outlook and French-speaking, upper-class audience in sustaining its “hors-texte” publication of women's portraits.

And, as we have seen across the genre of “Famous Women” biography, there was no necessary correlation between ideological outlook and the profusion of pictures. Labība Ahmad may have carried more articles on hijāb than did her more secularly oriented sisters in publication. But Labība herself had no qualms about appearing in full-page portraits in her religiously oriented magazine. And the Magazine of the Women's Awakening published a photograph of Zaghlūl, head uncovered, in October 1922. Yet it was a controversial issue. Al-Hisān defended itself from charges that it was un-Islamic with reference to its publication of a photograph of Safiyya Zaghlūl in its first issue (1925), as it published a photograph of both Zaghlūls one year later. The magazine gave a history of prominent Egyptian women allowing publication of their photographs: the first, it said, had been Nāsif; and then, after consulting with her husband, Zaghlūl had followed suit and after her, “the illustrated magazines began obtaining photographs of leaders from among excellent women, and confronted many obstacles and difficulties in obtaining them. This year, we anticipate receiving their photographs without problem—otherwise, what photographs will the women's magazines publish?” Do Egyptian women, the journal asks (perhaps alluding to its rival, al-‘‘Arūsa), want Egypt to be represented by photographs of “dancers, actresses, singers, and the like”? It specifically requests that teachers and school principals send their photographs.^[4]

As The Bride featured portraits, it also offered biographies, and this chapter's epigraph from its profile of the Begum of Bhopal confirms that it offered names familiar to the readers of women's magazines. Not only the Begum but also Safiyya Zaghlūl, Sarujini Naidu, Marie Curie, and of course Jeanne d'Arc appeared. It demonstrated intense interest in European royalty, although it did not tend to celebrate queens as paragons of domesticity. No other magazine had featured the notorious Christina of Sweden (1626–89), “this mannish woman who was eccentric of nature beyond one's power to imagine.”^[5] Unlike the other magazines, it showed an abiding interest in royal mistresses—and not ones famed for charity or for work in girls' education.

And rather than featuring a series called “Mothers of Great Men” or “Famous Women,” The Bride featured “Famous Women Criminals,” “Shahīrāt al-mujrimāt.” This did not necessarily preclude the didactic possibilities of biography. A profile of English thief Emily Lawrence began by declaring that “most female criminals” are distinguished by “conceit and self-confidence.” Though often “a paragon of beauty,” the female criminal is not necessarily so, but her face proves as good an indicator of character as did the countenances of paragons of virtue in the women's magazines. “As for the criminal with whom we are concerned, she was not beautiful at all. But her features harbored something that helped her execute her hellish plans.” She “studied the life style of the elite” until she could imitate them; and “the strange thing is that . . . she came to believe she was one of them.” What was the moral here? Although she stole a great deal of jewelry, “even so she was always in need of money.”^[6] Mary Levy's case was different: with a “lazy husband who had no liking for work or self-exertion,” and a rich but “miserly” uncle, she became a murderer “no less crafty” than Lawrence.^[7] Lucy Fairs echoed but subverted the usual attributive practice of “Famous Women” biography, for she “was possessed of excessive intelligence and pervasive trickery.” Out of prison after serving time for attempting to pilfer an inheritance, she was more determined than ever to steal.^[8] Chicago Mary “used to rely on her beauty, and it never failed her.”^[9]

The Bride featured many female entertainers, too, but few were virtuous role models signaling the respectability of a singing career for the young Arab woman.^[10] Raquel Miller, a famous actress, had decided to go into a convent, the magazine announced, and hence it would offer her biography. Despite the convent as news hook, the biography went on to focus on her love life, for she had made her decision after “not letting any sort of pleasure go untasted.”^[11] In this magazine, entertainers embody enticing faces and questionable acts. If Hikmat Fahmīī; (in a rare portrait of an Egyptian actress) had brought “calm and attractiveness” from the rural environment of her childhood, she now used “the weapons of her eyes,” and many actors had fallen to this “Sultaness of Love.”^[12] “Biography” collapses into “love story” over and over, as in a serial “real-life story” about Madame Lubisco “arabized” by ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz and published in the magazine's tenth year. And it was not fādila but fātina (alluring, captivating, seductive) that was The Bride's hallmark epithet. Such a label could be applied to La Belle Otero (Caroline Puentovalga, 1868–1965), whose “depravity reached such heights that we do not dare describe it on the pages of The Bride.”^[13] (Immediately below this biography was an announcement: “The Bride is the magazine of the family, the magazine of ladies.”) Sister biographical subjects were “Princess Python,” Amy Crocker Galtizin; Françoise Etiné, “the ferocious cat”; Claude France, “or the beautiful spy”; and of course the inimitable Mata Hari.

Here was a modern discourse on that ages-old theme, kayd al-nisā‘‘, “the trickery of women”; on femininity as a socially disruptive force. Whether it was with the aid of physical beauty or a six-shooter, woman was disturbance and commodity. A feature called “Beauties of History” remarked that “beauty might be misfortune for a woman” and went on to say that Cleopatra's beauty had been nothing compared with the lovelies of this age.^[14] Yet this was a divergent biographical discourse in another sense. Many of The Bride's subjects had grown up in poverty, and if the point was to highlight rags-to-riches romance, was that the only message? These subjects are depicted as determined to fight their way into income, if not respectability. All the “Famous Women Criminals” are portrayed as using their ruthless intelligence against the uncaring wealthy. Many, despite the epithets bestowed on them, are sympathetic characters against backdrops of moneyed and male evil. If this was biography as spectacle, it was also more democratic. Perhaps it signaled a changing readership as well as new cultural forces.

Moreover, this was not the whole story. In its very first issue The Bride featured a short profile of Esther Fahmāī Wīī;sā, one of the many founding members of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee. The magazine hoped that “many Egyptian women would follow in her footsteps.”^[15] The second issue opened with a “never-before-published” portrait of a young-looking Safiyya Zaghlūl, her coiffed hair uncovered. The accompanying text emphasized her political energies as well as her supportive role as spouse. On page three, two columns of statistics dispelled the notion held by “those of ease and wealth, the bureaucrats and those of their class” that Egyptian women worked solely as home managers and parents, “a belief far from the truth.”^[16] Two issues later, an enormous portrait and forthright text celebrated Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, acknowledged leader of Egypt's first organized and named feminist acts, a patriot who brooked no compromise with nationalist demands that put women's needs last. Sha‘‘rāwīī; was not a biographical subject in extant issues of (other) 1920s women's magazines, although they reported her comings and goings. Was she too independent—and too close for comfort—to serve as a role model? But if Egypt's men could be lauded for their nationalist efforts, announced The Bride, this woman deserved even more; for she had worked on behalf of women.^[17] The magazine followed political demands of Egyptian women as well as women internationally, alongside its advertisements for beauty aids and fashions. Celebrating Florence Fawwāz as a lauded opera star in Australia and London, it assumed a stance of local pride: “We should be more delighted with her than are the English.”^[18]Al-‘‘Aruūsa followed battles over women's admission to professions and asserted women's equal abilities,^[19] although perhaps its examples were not to the taste of some. In the same issue that celebrated Sha‘‘rāwīī;, an essay on “Famous Women” declared that just as many females as males had been imprisoned or executed for political reasons and crimes. Brief lives of Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, Charlotte Corday, and Marie Antoinette followed. If they were “victims of political passions,” at least their strengths were not said to be in the arena of home management.^[20]

Yet the mixed messages biography could generate—and the explicit attempt to instruct female readers on how to read a life according to gendered prescriptions—emerge forcefully in The Bride's biography of Caterina Sforza. It begins, as I noted in chapter 3, by declaring the educational utility of biography—this woman's life history would be good “for every woman in the world to read . . . for the benefit it contains.” Female readers are reminded that greatness and gender are independent variables: “because in her time Caterina Sforza played a great role, no less important than those of the age's great men.” What role? “In her life, Caterina committed crimes the recall of which makes bodies shiver. Yet she also tendered good works that every living conscience remembers with gratitude and every refined soul approves. She left legacies of great benefit to the daughters of her kind.” The biography describes her assumption of military leadership and soldiers' garb to defend the city her husband ruled against the forces of Cesare Borgia. But how? “Taking up the sword,” she also “tried to cast fitna among the enemy ranks with the aid of her compelling beauty.” That her success was temporary is perhaps one of the biography's more subtle messages.

At this point the female reader is instructed further on how to read a female life. For “the military deeds that Caterina performed are not what ladies need to concern themselves with reading. Rather [they should concern themselves with] her interest in matters pertaining to women, her valuable investigations into techniques a woman must pursue to preserve her beauty, make her face pretty and delicate of appearance, and influence men's minds so they are attracted to her.” The text reproduces Sforza's recipes for clarifying the complexion and whitening the teeth. But this prescriptive narrowing at the biography's end sits uneasily with the military feats female readers are told to ignore, for the latter take up twice as much space on the page as Caterina's legacy to the female complexion.^[21]

This biography of Sforza also keys us into how the politics of “East” and “West” appeared rather differently in al-‘‘Aruūsa than in women's magazines, but how in fact these politics form a sort of bridge between the biographies of this period and the rhetorical contours of their descendants late in the twentieth century. If The Bride celebrated Safiyya Zaghlūl as model nationalist and mother and Nabawiyya Mūsā as the epitome of the dedicated teacher, it took on Mata Hari as the epitome of evil. All criminals and beauty queens, and almost all entertainers, who appear in this magazine were of the West. So were English physician Louisa Aldrich Blake as well as Marie Curie and Jeanne d'Arc, of course, but such figures were in a minority as “Famous Women” in this magazine. This was a trend that the EFU's French-language magazine, L'Egyptienne, would recognize in its own 1934 profile of Curie, when it remarked that “in a time of publicity when eyes have time only for actresses,” it was important to mourn Curie's death and to think about her life.^[22]

Thus, even in The Bride, biographies worked on several levels. Managing images of womanhood that were unstable, acting as a prescriptive technique that was both expansive and narrowly though unevenly regulatory, these texts suggest the multiple strands of thought and experience that nourished early debates on the woman question, as they also intimate the difficult negotiations that Arab feminists would face in years to come. The Bride is indicative of new pressures and interests on the popular magazine scene. For the sensational and the salacious became gradually more marked as it moved into its second half decade.

Later Women's Aagazines

Biographies of “Famous Women” continued to appear in post–World War II women's periodicals. If the spotlight was increasingly on Arab and Muslim women, this was not entirely so. In its first year, Fātima Ni‘‘mat Rāshid's 1940s journal Fatāt al-ghad carried biographies of Zaghlūl, Curie, Jane Addams, “Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek,” and Helen Keller. Jamīī;la al‘‘Alā’ءilīī;'s al-Ahdāf (1948–51?) featured “literature of the jawārī” and a few “Striving Women,” all local: Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī;, Mayy Ziyāda. Munīī;ra Thābit, as we know, allowed Jeanne d'Arc into the pages of al-Amal, but other articles tended to incorporate news of women's activities into discussions of politics, while profiling a few recently deceased men and women and offering brief news of a few prominent local writers and activists—Bint alShāti‘‘, Durriyya Shafīī;q, Amīī;na al-Sa‘‘īī;d.

The message had become more muted, too. Early in the century, readers were instructed repeatedly to look to the lives of famous women for models. Their granddaughters were left to draw their own conclusions, even as biographies became less common in magazines geared to them. The 1950s' crop of girls' school magazines, funded by the Nasser government, contained almost no biographies, although a predecessor, the 1934 annual of the Princess Fawziyya Secondary School for Girls, had featured “The Heroine Joan of Arc,” written in English by a student.^[23] In 1958, ‘‘A’ءisha ‘‘Abd al-Rahmān, “Bint al-Shāti‘‘,” then an assistant professor, published a study on mystic poet Rābi‘‘a al-‘‘Adawiyya in the ‘‘Ayn Shams University Women's College annual.^[24]

It might be argued that textual role models were no longer urgent at a time when women's visibility in the workplace and universities carried its own message. I think biography also was a casualty of the direction in which these magazines tended to move, toward greater commercialization and focus on the realms of fashion and home commodities. Many magazines of the 1940s and after, beginning with Anā wa-anta (founded 1936), showed “little interest in women's minds.” Profiles of famous women were likely to focus on “Beauty Queens in History,” as a series in this journal did, featuring Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Queen Farīī;da.^[25]

But the relative absence of biography also might have reflected the growing presence of autobiography in magazines and elsewhere. In the 1930s, Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilāī had written a very personal, autobiographically tinged sketch of Mayy Ziyāda, carrying on Mayy's own practice. Maga-zines of the 1920s had begun to admit writing in an autobiographical form in the genre of “letters” between friends that bore messages congruous with magazines' critiques of gendered behavior. They featured occasional “autobiographical” texts, although, I suspect, some were written by editors. (Recall the Egyptian Woman's Magazine's “Memoirs of the Elderly Woman,” a wonderful vehicle for social critique.) The genre of letters between friends, or of “Memoirs,” with the autobiographical possibilities each one bore, also afforded an intimate tone of address to an implied female audience, and therefore a continuous construction of that audience, as I argued in chapter 2. In the fourth volume of the Magazine of the Women's Awakening, the first-person narrator of “Mudhakkirāt ‘‘Ādila” (Memoirs of ‘‘Ādila / “A Just Woman”) lectured her friend Nabīī;la (“A Noble Woman”) on morals, principles of behavior, the importance of religion, and so forth. Addressing “my sister,” the “writer” of these “letters” was also addressing her other reading “sisters,” the magazine's sought audience of schoolgirls and other females.^[26] And The Bride had published a profile of Nabawiyya Mūsā that was proto-autobiography. She talked of her early life. (Yet the profile's title highlighted less her early life than a question: “Why does she refuse marriage?”)^[27]

Without a doubt it was becoming more acceptable to construct one's own life for readers, as Nabawiyya Mūsā did with her “Dhikrayātīī;” (“My Memories”) series in her journal, al-Fatāt, beginning in 1939.^[28] Mūsā's memoirs recapitulated many issues articulated in the “Famous Women” texts. She was the heroine, beset by life's trials.^[29] Perhaps Munīī;ra Thābit's al-Amal did not feature biographies (except, of course, for Jeanne d'Arc) because the magazine was replete with its editor's autobiographical musings. In 1956, I‘‘tidāl Hammūda culminated the short history of her periodical Fatayāt Misr (1956–57?) with a long autobiographical piece on her struggle to find an outlet for her political beliefs. Journals of the 1940s and later began to feature interviews with contemporary women—as the Magazine of the Women's Awakening had done in the 1930s. These profiles played the same role biography had played earlier.

If biography had become less important as a mode of imagining alternative lives, this was also probably because of the radically changing status of fiction and especially the growing number of published female fiction writers. Scholars of English cultural history have argued that women of the Victorian English bourgeoisie might have drawn on literary characters as a source for self-modeling, a way of “developing character.” Others have maintained that fiction has fulfilled that need for females ever since.^[30] In early twentieth-century Egypt, there was not yet a respectably established fictional tradition into which women could read or, indeed, write, their changing expectations, although scholars are now delving into the early assays into modern Arabic fiction and finding women at the forefront.^[31] It is notable, too, that some of the earliest male novelists placed female heroines at the center of their work; could they have provided imaginative fields in which reading girls might roam? Jurjīī; Zaydān's historical novels are the obvious referent, but Niqūlā Haddād and others seemed equally interested in the fictional possibilities of female protagonists.^[32]

Yet it must be remembered that female protagonists of early fiction by men often were a downtrodden lot. They exposed through their fictional biographies the state of women/the nation against which their creators railed. Biographies of “Famous Women,” by contrast, drew on both images of strong women and the respectability—and cultural purity—of the Arabic biographical tradition. But as the century went on, female readers could turn to female characters crafted by women to furnish their imaginations with heroines, and with the truth claims that—fortunately or not—tend to shape popular attitudes toward the relationship between female writers and their fictions. Al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī;, who in a profile in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening had declared her interest in fiction that would teach morals, gave her own fiction and essays pride of place over biography in her magazine al-Ahdāf. And with Latīī;fa al-Zayyāt's acclaimed 1960 bildungsroman al-Bāb al-maftuūh (The Open Door), adolescent girls could identify with a young female heroine, struggling with her sexuality and restraints on her public nationalist activism, who imagines herself as Marie Curie.

It is worth recalling, too, the emergence of a curious genre in the 1920s that bridged “autobiography” and “fiction” more deliberately, perhaps, than do most autobiographies, at least until recently. This was the sensational memoir of either a “fallen” individual or a working-class subject, published for the delectation of a literate, elite audience outside the lifeworld of the “autobiographical I.” Invariably, these works are said to be authored by the subject at the center but “edited” or “refined” by educated males. They are significant in this context for tracing “life histories” against frameworks of clearly articulated moralist/reformist aims. The Memoirs of an Egyptian Lady in Waiting, published serially in 1927, purport to tell the story of the “author,” Zaynab Muhammad, who describes herself as daughter of a bey, of Turkish family no less. She is driven from her “palace” by the evil intentions of her dissolute half brother, who tricks her loving father into repudiating her (after, by the way, he has spent a great deal of money on her education by tutors and at the Saniyya School). She embarks on a series of adventures in, among other things, Cairo houseboats, notorious at the time as upper-class brothels. The narrative affords a lively critique of polygyny, the ease of divorce, the Capitular Protections that European residents enjoyed and some locals exploited, police corruption, and other issues of concern at the time. It is given an aura of respectability by Zaynab Muhammad's preface:

To you, O fathers; to you, O mothers; to you, O awakening youth of Egypt, young men and young women, indeed, to all the children of the East, and especially to the noble Egyptian nation, I am honored to present these memoirs. I undertook them for the purpose of deterring families. My memoirs apply themselves to the serious offenses of clans who have fallen into vice. At the same time, they urge virtue and combat vice with a sword brandished; indeed, in them the reader will find signs of purity and probity, nobility and honor. Moreover, he will find the causes of the Egyptian nation's ta’ءakhkhur, and the secrets of the degradation that prevails over the children of the radiant Nile Valley.^[33]

Here was a “biographical” form that could entertain as it claimed reformist aims; that, in installment after installment, could narrate “vice” in the name of “virtue.”

As biography in women's magazines waned, women's biography was revived in volumes of collected “Great Women” by Nasserist, populistoriented writers, beginning in the mid-1950s. These, too, offered role models, tuned to a new ideology. When Fā‘‘iza ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d published al-Mar’ءa fī mayādīn al-kifāh (Woman in Fields of Battle) in Egypt's government publishing house in 1967, the woman with hair streaming and arm uplifted on the cover represented both the premodern Arab subjects that filled the book's first half and the European women of the second half—as well as the book's final subject, a woman killed during the massacre of Palestinians in Dayr Yassin, Palestine, in 1948. If Fātima al-Zahrā‘‘ and Asmā’ء bt. Abīī; Bakr were named exemplary models for Arab women, Jeanne d'Arc's biography echoed the third worldist rhetoric of Nasserist Egypt even in its title: “Woman and the Struggle to Liberate Peoples: Jeanne d'Arc.” Commented ‘‘Abd al-Majīī;d: “Jeanne d'Arc's cry for freedom still sweeps across oppressed peoples to settle as firm belief deep within.”^[34] And Jeanne's mission “to her people was nothing other than a new belief in a new world of freedom and salvation.”^[35] The description takes a page from Nasser's domestic policy, too, as the author refers to the plight of the French peasantry under English rule. “Those good peasants, how could they survive after the land had been plundered from them? For it was tantamount to their soul, to the blood vessels that allow life. . . . Were its soil and yield prohibited to them [harām ‘‘alayhim] after that day [of English occupation], yet permitted [halāl] to every tyrant?”^[36] Blending Nasserist socialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric with religious diction, Jeanne's example—and malleability—remained useful in Egypt.

In the tradition of Zaynab Fawwāz and Mayy Ziyāda, today's Arab feminists have produced biographies of illustrious forebears whom they see as underwriting their own work and sense of career. Many of those writing biography are, like Fawwāz and Ziyāda, from the Lebanon, although of course their Lebanon is a different one.^[37] The role-modeling potential remains evident. Lebanese novelist Emily Nasrallāh remembers that when she published biographies of noted women in the Lebanese women's magazine Fayruūz, she “wanted to say to my Arab sisters, 'Fine, make yourself beautiful, but remember that you have something upstairs.'” And she deliberately chose women who “accomplished something on their own.”^[38]

But in Egypt, and elsewhere too, the production of biographical compilations is proceeding apace in association with a renewed marketing of conduct literature aimed at defining and regulating female behavior. Much of this literature—and many of the biographical works associated with it—consists of republication of medieval material, in new packaging, often with editors' or publishers' prefaces that yoke the text to the contours of contemporary society. Lives of women of the prophet Muhammad's family circulate endlessly. As was true early in the century, and as we will see in chapter 8, they work to define and stabilize gender identities and relations by offering what are seen as suitable role models for women.

Notes