5. Catherine the Great's Embroidery and Maria Mitchell's Stewpot

Discursive Domesticities

Anyone observing [Fatma Aliye] devoting herself heart and soul to learning would think she had neglected the essential household tasks secluded ones must perform. But she did not neglect constant improvement in the occupations mistresses of seclusion must learn; in this she shone among her peers. . . . She undertook her own agenda of composing scholarly works but could not find the time necessary to prepare them for publication, because first and foremost she was occupied with the concerns women naturally acquire, like home management and child rearing.

She was famed for justice, resolve, mildness. . . . Royal duties did not avert her from domestic obligations. Indeed she was much concerned with raising and educating her children. Moreover, she supervised the management of her palace and properties. . . . It is said she was a good cook, especially skilled at making sweets. To fine attributes she joined beauty of face, sweetness of elocution, and elegance of conversation. Thus was she a paragon of womanly perfection.

In sum, this queen's determined efforts resulted in manifest progress that was the envy of other nations. . . . But nothing distracted her from occupying herself with the art of embroidery.

An obituary for Almāza Kayrūz (d. 1928), Lebanese immigrant to South Africa, begins on a conventional note. “I bring you the sad news of the death of an excellent woman, one deemed the best of models for women, a [source of] pride to the daughters of her kind. She was famed for her virtues, praiseworthy qualities, charity, and energetic work.” What sort of “praiseworthy qualities” and “energetic work” made her “the best of models”? Widowed in 1892, a young woman with four children, Kayrūz had tried to maintain the family farm in the Lebanon. “But she saw no alternative to emigration, and left the homeland for Transvaal with her two sons, leaving her two daughters well-protected. . . . She worked in commerce to the extent her experience and finances permitted; it was not long before her intelligence, hard work, and probity rewarded her with success.” This was not the whole story.

Overwhelmingly concerned with raising her sons, she was a severe disciplinarian who kept close watch over their behavior and morals. . . . Thus did her sons grow up to become energetic men adorned with the virtues and praiseworthy qualities of their mother. They built a superb success upon hers. Their upright conduct rewarded them with great success, ample income, happy marriages, and fine children. They acknowledge the credit; their accomplishment redounds to their mother's care.^[1]

A successful businesswoman, Kayrūz was an exemplary subject ultimately as the mother of successful sons who embodied their mother's “virtues and praiseworthy qualities” through a masculine-defined, class-specific, modern pattern of “success” based on bourgeois entrepreneurial energy. For if her work in commerce had been important to assuring their careers, the work of discipline and moral example overshadowed it in the biography's rhetoric. And over the course of the biographical narrative her daughters disappear from view, presumably also to raise exemplary sons.

If the rhetoric of exemplarity I traced in chapter 3 acted as a signpost for destinations it mapped, it did not in itself privilege one life path or definition of “success” over another, or distribute exemplarity evenly across every female endeavor. Throughout this press and period, “Famous Women” exhibit a double move. The particular lives featured, framed in the rhetoric of exemplarity, suggest a desire to legitimize expanded lives for women but simultaneously a will to bound that expansion. This double aspiration, rendered in biography, also acts to reassure those who might be nervous about some women's and girls' changing desires and life patterns. In parallel, a dominant tactical move in biographies of women with waged work or public careers is to assert the primacy of domestic loyalties while making the claim that duty at home need not obviate another career. It is no accident that we witness Catherine the Great at her embroidery, Fatma Aliye raising children, Jane Austen sewing, Queen María Christina boiling sweets, Zaynab Fawwāz and Maria Mitchell washing the cooking pots.

This rhetorical dialectic operates in tandem with discursive constructions of companionate marriage as desirable and then expectable, and of the nuclear family as the ideal unit of national organization—norms and structures already in the process of formation that articulated the emergence of changing work patterns for (some) men, too. Instituting a certain ideal of family relations, these biographies, like conduct literature and emergent fiction, took on the ideological task that Nancy Armstrong has described for fiction and conduct literature in eighteenth-century England: “Authors and readers—men and women both—used the same rules to formulate a new mode of economic thinking, even though they represented that thinking as pertaining only to women. . . . By virtue of its apparent insignificance, a body of writing concerned with devising a special kind of education for women in fact played a crucial role in the rise of the new middle classes in England.”^[2] Armstrong—as well as Judith Newton, Mary Poovey, Mary Ryan, Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, and others—links the rise of conduct books for women in England to the centrality of the “new domestic woman” in cementing ascendant bourgeois power configurations. This “new domestic woman” was to be educated in frugality, to “complement [her husband's] role as an earner and producer with hers as a wise spender and tasteful consumer.” It was this figure of the desirable educated homemaker who “first encroached upon aristocratic culture and seized authority from it.”^[3] If Armstrong perhaps binds this figure too closely to the hegemonizing ascendancy of bourgeois culture without considering alternative kinds of power—or resistance—that might become possible,^[4] still, I find her argument suggestive for a very different historical context, in which the rise of new norms that facilitated a certain kind of socioeconomic hegemony was complicated by the urgency of casting that hegemony in nationalist, anti-imperialist terms of identity. The image of the new middle-class woman figured a certain kind of ascendancy; it was the grounds for an assertion of how that ascendancy could guarantee the “progress” of a nation along individualist liberal norms. Through the figuration of domesticity, biography in Egypt helps us to see just what demands were to be made upon this female figure as the grounds of a particular framing of national/ist strength and pride. It helps us see where notions of “home” intersected with demands of “nation,” and how politically significant the configurations of women, work, and home were. In this chapter I analyze the double move of expansion and constraint that governs the deployment of domesticity in these biographical texts. But does a dichotomous categorization of “expansion” and “constraint” capture what is going on in the text, or what might have been going on among text, audience, and editors? Domesticity helped to shape, name, and signal the semiotics of modernity; but it is just as important not to dichotomize the multiple effects and impacts of “modernity” as it is crucial not to reduce “modernity's” contesting elements and actors to “Western” versus “indigenous” or, even worse, “modern” versus “traditional.” Nor is it possible to define the trajectory of modernity as a linear one of “progress.” If “progress” was defined as linear and outward in some polemics in this press and in some biographies, other biographies probed or hedged that movement. Was women's access to waged work necessarily “positive”? Or “liberating”? Were the professionalization of the domestic sphere and the assertion of women's power through maternalist discourse “empowering”? Or did these simply imprison? To what extent did biography prescribe, and to what extent did it articulate the stresses and achievements already present in magazine readers' lives? One might assume that as time passed and as “Famous Women” came to include more contemporary Arab and/or Muslim women with extradomestic professional careers, the domestic imperative would become more muted. But in the late 1920s and 1930s the “woman-behind-the-man” was more in evidence as biographical subject. This figure reflected (and helped to solidify) the crystallization of a nationalist gender politics; but it also acted as a rearguard action, a gesture to defend women's movement into public life. For some, highlighting women's domestic roles was a negative reaction to social change. The backlash of the 1930s was probably partly a response to women's increasing activity in the professional workplace. Badran notes that feminists themselves “stepped up the discourse on the importance of women's family roles.”^[5]

We must remind ourselves, too, that magazines by their nature do not speak with one voice, even though the context for periodical production in this historical moment was one in which journals were often outlets for particular groups or agendas, or were clearly the products of one or a very few individuals. Even if Alexandra Avierino was the voice behind The Sociable Companion, “her” magazine did not speak with one ideological tongue. Nor, as I have argued, did its interests necessarily converge with those of other women's magazines. By the time it announced its new “Home Management” feature (not until its second year, 1899), its contents exhibited less interest in gender than most of the other “women's magazines.” As in The Selected, it would tend to isolate much of its explicitly woman reader–oriented material within this feature, thereby rhetorically presuming a comprehensive correspondence between “domesticity” and “woman.” But this was in tension with its biographies, which undermined rather than enhanced the programmatic rhetoric of other texts published under the same editor's aegis. As we know, the magazine's life histories featured women scholars and educators who taught not home management but rather the hard sciences, or journalists such as Juliet Adam and “Sévèrine” (Caroline Remy Guebhard). Meanwhile, the prefatory words of “Home Management” declared sternly that “woman's true function given her by nature is motherhood” and warned that the “rare intelligence” and “broad learning” that women had “sometimes” achieved must not “offer woman an occasion [or reason] to neglect her duties toward others.” Defining domestic tasks as wājibāt, the text argued that such “duties” entailed conditions too numerous and vital to cover in one article. So the magazine would now carry a regular feature.^[6] Yet the next issue assured readers that the topic was not limited to “matters inside the home” but encompassed “everything connected with family and social life, in all stages and situations. . . . Indeed, it would be more appropriate to call this feature 'Life or World Management' . . . for the home in truth is the world in miniature.” This privileged women's sphere as comprehensive, yet an ideal of carefully circumscribed domesticity supplied the magazine's justification for female education: “If we insist on educating the woman and improving her conditions this is only in order that she will comprehend the task assigned to her.”^[7] Were readers of Avierino's biographical sketches puzzled as they learned of professors of linguistics, philosophy, history, and literature as well as the sciences? Was it enough that this parade of academic excellence was qualified by the fact that most of Avierino's subjects had careers teaching in women's colleges or gymnasia? Perhaps more important, biographies that “gave proof of woman's glory” and the rhetoric of the “Home Management” column privileged women's impact on society as all-encompassing, even (or especially) when exercised from the home. The journal had invoked the metaphor of the “women's ship of state.” As Judith Newton observes for England, the language of reform and the demarcation of social spheres along gendered lines blurred the very divisions that language was in the business of constructing. To call women “ministers of the interior”—or, in Egypt, to remind readers of women's ship of state—“insinuates as many parallels between women and men, domestic and public, as it does differences, and, as part of an argument for excluding women from formal political power, it also politicizes the domestic sphere.”^[8]

There is no doubt that Avierino and other writers in Egypt were drawing on concepts of domesticity that elites in Europe and North America had elaborated, crystallizing in an “ideal of the 'notable housewife'” and through a discourse of “rationalizing” housework, mutually reinforcing concepts that were at their discursive height by the mid–nineteenth century in North America, and earlier in Europe.^[9] Featured in English and American women's reading material, surely the “notable housewife” found her way into “Famous Women” texts in Egypt through the wide reading of editors and others. As time went on, such tropes were appropriated and rearticulated through translations and locally composed conduct books. Yet premodern Arabic biographies could also supply a usable rhetoric of household management, as long as the reader could ignore that the “household” evoked by such texts was an enormous Abbasid or Ottoman court complex, hardly to be “managed” in the same way as the nuclear-family domicile.

In the United States “the ideology of domesticity arose in the middle class and may well have been one of the principal means by which the middle class assumed a self-conscious identity in the antebellum period.”^[10] It was conceived as an arena of power: “The domestic sphere was not viewed as an ahistorical enclave where people could meet basic needs . . . but rather as a dynamic scene of actions that could affect the outcome of history.”^[11] In Britain “the empowering of the middle classes” through “dissemination of a new female ideal” in fiction and conduct literature has generated strong claims made eloquently by Armstrong:

To consider the rise of the domestic woman as a major event in political history is not, as it may seem, to present a contradiction in terms, but to identify the paradox that shapes modern culture. It is also to trace the history of a specifically modern form of desire that . . . changed the criteria for determining what was most important in a female. In countless educational treatises and works of fiction that were supposedly written for women, this form of desire came into being along with a new kind of woman. And by representing life with such a woman as not only desirable but also available to virtually anyone, this ideal eventually reached beyond the beliefs of region, faction, and religious sect to unify the interests of those groups who were neither extremely powerful nor very poor.^[12]

This unifying ideal helped to fuse a collective identity that nurtured European imperial energies. Because the cult of domesticity “did little or nothing to challenge the idea of sexual asymmetry,” it could also involve “invidious assumptions about women of other classes, regions and ethnic origins.”^[13] Classist, ageist, and racist notions were served by the professionalization of the domestic sphere. In the United States this took the form of an emphasis on “training” immigrants into a “native” AngloSaxon North American norm; in England, it fueled missionary work and secular feminist reformist energies in the colonies, giving “civilizational” justification to the imperial march, as simultaneously it articulated social reform among Britain's “domestic” poor.^[14] The discourses of colonial “civilizing” and domestic “reform” shaped each other. As Karen Hansen remarks,

In the politics of colonial domination, the conceptual construction of domesticity was at the forefront of change, as were those who gave it institutional efficacy. Thus ideas of domesticity constitute a central dimension of this encounter and offer startling insights not only into the development of empire and the colonial experience, but also into the everyday world of the postcolonial era. . . . The ideologies associated with domesticity played a crucial and as yet insufficiently acknowledged role in influencing the cultural ordering of African history.^[15]

In Egypt, if this ideal fueled colonialist energies, its appropriation into the formation of a middle-class female subject position meant it became available as a distinctive marker of social positioning. Furthermore, it was something to be “taught” by those so positioned to other women locally, as a process, a way to organize space, and a moral outlook on the world. It intersected with the notion that benevolence and charity work were appropriate for elite women.

As I have said, the nationalist search for an origin or essence that would signal the difference and authenticity of the nation centered in the 1920s on ancient Egypt; for those worried about national unity, this was less problematic than the Islamic past. Constructing ancient Egyptian womanhood in terms of domesticity, companionate marriage, and learned motherhood offered a localized modernity that exemplifies what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as the different authenticity that is yet “amenable to global-European constructions of modernity so that the quintessentially nationalist claim of being 'different but modern' can be validated.”^[16] Women's magazines constructed ancient Egyptian women as exemplary and efficient homemakers; they constructed modern descendants who had not made it into the middle classes as needing “guidance” to fulfill these roles. It was the emergent bourgeoisie, with its consuming modernity, that defined those roles and decided who “lacked” them, even as that bourgeoisie also “needed” the ideal peasant to complete its own formation of a national identity.^[17] Through biography, among other forms of discourse, this “mission” was sanctioned: as we have seen, “Famous Women” were lauded for their efforts at domestic education not only among the girls of the middle class but also among the poor, and not only in Egypt but also in “the West.” An ascending hegemony of the bourgeoisie that Europe had already witnessed on its own terrain could be localized, feminized, and asserted as a nationalist goal and strategy through biographical presentation: educator Mary Lyon and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry become local heroes.

But Claudia Tate has suggested that domesticity as an ideal could be appropriated for the political agendas of subordinate groups, and this has implications for its ambiguous positioning (to late-twentieth-century readers, at least) as part of a rising bourgeois identity among colonized elites. She traces the construction of a domestic ideal in late-nineteenth-century novels by African-American women. Tate's historical contextualization of these novels suggests to her that, far from representing a mode of escapism from the growing and increasingly violent racism of post-Reconstruction America, this fiction inserted itself into contemporary politics by generating a political discourse of civil responsibility. For readers, “bourgeois domesticity, an assimilationist discourse for inspiring racial integration, was a politically liberal objective.”^[18] In Egypt, as the local elite appropriated this concept to strengthen its position against other groups of Egyptians, it could also use it to assert its own modernist vitality vis-à-vis the colonialists. Perhaps domesticity was a derivative discourse, and perhaps local commentators were mimicking their British rulers, as Leila Ahmed has argued.^[19] But it was a discourse that had its own cluster of local meaning and creative possibility for a local elite. Domesticity European-style was not appropriated uncritically, either. Helping local female elites to assert their own place in a discourse of national assertion and civic responsibility, its outlines were permeable and occasionally open to question.

As Baron says of the women's magazines in Egypt before 1919, “They all devoted large sections to instructions on housekeeping. They elevated a domestic ideal and then offered readers training in how to live up to it.”^[20] But some did this more than others, while biography echoed, illustrated, and also probed critically that ideal, or rather its situating in the complicated lives of women. Assuming a gendered division of labor, Zaynab Fawwāz had asked in al-Fatāt whether men's work or women's—“pregnancy, childbirth, child raising, home management, and the like”—was more fatiguing.^[21] Biographies did not wholly uphold this gendered division of labor. Of the seventeen profiles in The Young Woman, only two posed domesticity as central (Rāhīl al-Bustānī, Maria Theodorovna), and in neither was it an exclusive focus. For domesticity as an articulated rhetorical space would become more marked after the turn of the century. But domestic space was not wholly absent from the magazine; the “Famous Women” profiles in its first issue are interrupted by an article on embroidery.^[22] Nawfal's opening article (featuring women famous for eloquence, intelligence, and the ability to impose a public self, but who were also celebrated for self-effacement) introduced themes that would run throughout this press, notably the importance of trained daughters who would become responsible women—“educated by wealth and disciplined by poverty”^[23]—and the notion of moral and intellectual “adornment” as preferable to the physical. Yet one of its first biographies does not fit the gendered labor divide that the opening assumes even as it celebrates notable women's many pursuits.

Women, Biography, and the Domestic in Two Parallel Presses

The one-page obituary-biography of Irish horse trainer and journalist Maria Morgan featured in August 1892 in The Selected, a major cultural monthly, appeared four months later in the first issue of The Young Woman. By then it had also appeared in the first issue (September 1892) of al-Hilāl (The Crescent), which quickly emerged as a rival to The Selected among leading “general-interest” (and male-run) magazines. Two years later, Fawwāz included precisely the same narrative in Scattered Pearls, minus the opening sentence that marked it as an obituary.

The Selected had welcomed The Young Woman as a forum solely for women's pens, echoing founder Hind Nawfal's declaration of the journal's envisioned community. But how did this situate Maria Morgan's life history, imported word for word from the male-scripted Selected?^[24] True, al-Muqtataf's biography-obituaries of Maryam Makāriyūs, Nasra Ghurrayib, and Eliza Everett were attributed to Yāqūt Sarrūf, as was its life of Maria Mitchell. And the journal's life of al-Khansā‘‘ was written by Maryam Makāriyūs. But other biographies of women in that journal (such as Morgan's) were not attributed to female authorship.^[25] That Morgan's life history circulated from general magazines to a journal targeted at females suggests that “Famous Women” attracted more than one audience. But behind an apparent similarity in biographical practice stood a set of differences that highlight the domestic more as a space for debate in the women's press and more as a taken-for-granted category of gendered experience in the “malestream” magazines. Sarrūf's biography-obituaries and Makāriyūs on al-Khansā‘‘ hover somewhere between, marking out a space of difference.

Maria Morgan's life history as first published in The Selected celebrated an individual whose fame rested on her visibility, her public persona, indeed, her showmanship as both equestrian and journalist. Morgan's family life goes unmentioned but for the fact that she and her sister traveled and worked together: they were public people together. This is the portrait of a businesswoman, a skilled professional in more than one sphere, a woman compelled to earn her living who makes such a success out of it that at her death she is building a large home, a woman for whom marriage and children are not part of the picture. Morgan as biographical subject does not simply repress the image of the domestic woman; she overturns it.^[26]

Like Morgan, most women featured in The Selected from 1890 to 1914 were highly visible career women (often unmarried and childless) or ruling monarchs. But it seems less the female life that interests the editors, or even the life history's implications for reimagining gendered divisions of labor, than the life insofar as it intersects with the journal's overarching pedagogical agenda. Offered in the service of discussions that engage the editors, Annie Besant's (1847–1933) biography is a mere prelude to an elaborate, negative explication of Theosophy, as is a life of Helena Blavatsky (1831–91). That of Clémence Royer (1830–1902) prefaces her commentary on and a translation of Darwin.^[27] Yet as a journal devoted to propagating a vision of secularist, European-oriented national development according to teleological notions of scientific progress and the tenets of social Darwinism,^[28]The Selected featured articles on the need to educate women to take conscious part in national regeneration. The periodical's biographies of women suited this aim as they underwrote other preoccupations. Mostly silent on where the domestic fit into these lives, a majority of women's biographies appearing in The Selected's first thirty volumes were positioned at the back of the magazine (just as the women's section had come last in some early Arabic biographical dictionaries). Set off from the magazine's featured articles, they appeared in the regular column “Tadbīr al-manzil”—“Home Management.” Perhaps this was the substance of Zaynab Fawwāz's complaint that no one was writing women's lives, for these women's biographies were not part of the life-and-times sweep of history inscribed in biographies of men, almost invariably lodged in the front of the general magazine among leading articles.^[29] Celebrated for their work outside the home, these women subjects are set firmly within it by the magazine's positioning of their life stories—the silent assumption that women's lives could be collapsed into “Home Management.” What sort of message did it convey, that Maria Morgan's life history was followed by short pieces on the benefits of drinking lemon juice, the virtues of proper hospitality, and new means of banishing insects from the home? Perhaps these companion entries made it possible to eschew mention of Morgan's domestic life: they reminded readers that “Home Management,” after all, was to be both women's priority and an arena for knowledge, professionalism, and control.^[30]

Yāqūt Sarrūf's biographies did probe connections between domestic life, intellectual and professional endeavor, and women's friendships and collective work. She also alluded to a specifically female audience as those who would be reading biographies in the magazine's “Home Management” section when, eulogizing her friend Nasra Ilyās Ghurayyib (1862–89), she said, “The late lamented was one of womankind's finest. I enjoyed her friendship for a time and learned something of the history of her life. Now I summarize it for the honorable female readers of al-Muqtataf to lighten the pain of separation that lies in my soul.” She took to heart Makāriyūs's insistence on the importance of bringing maternal influence to light in female biography, too, as she sounded themes we have encountered, and ones that would run incessantly, if not always explicitly, through female biographies of the next fifty years at least. Nasra, she said,

nursed on the milk of learning in [Tarābulus, al-Shām's] schools, for her mother was one of womankind's best. From her [Nasra] inherited goodness of morals, purity of intentions, and gentleness of nature. She was her [mother's] only one, and so [her mother] dedicated herself to raising her, and through example and trained upbringing [al-qudwa wa-al-tarbiya] was able to instill these fine attributes. For these three forces—inheritance, example, trained upbringing—are the source of morals and their support. Rarely is a branch healthy when the trunk is malignant; rarely can a branch be rotted when the trunk is sound.^[31]

In this life addressed to female readers, Ghurayyib is the exemplary female reader, and her example leads to collective female endeavor identified by the gendered and mutually reinforcing combination of education and domesticity:

She used to love al-Muqtataf, perusing it and studying the subjects it presented. She took pleasure in scientific research, listening to it and participating as one who understood its fine points. She read a great deal and was precise in her critique; if a book pleased her, she advised her female friends to read it, and if she found something ill-advised she would toss [the book] away and berate its writer.

When we came to Cairo—my beloved friend the late Maryam Makāriyūs and I—we took up residence in a home near hers. Our bonds of affection grew strong. Often she talked with us about woman's condition in the [Arab] East.^[32] How we all wished for the spread of girls' education and refinement in a manner that would turn their attention away from acquiring the mere husks of European civilization as sufficient and would entice them to acquire the sublime virtues that elevate a woman's state and prepare her to raise and train the human species.^[33]

At the center of “Home Management” stood reading mothers who could articulate girls' education as an expansion of domestic duty—for both the teachers and the taught.

When Jurjī Zaydān's upstart Crescent challenged The Selected at the end of 1892, the first page featured “The Most Important Events and the Greatest Men.” As history and the heroic life story defined each other, the (male) individual as history maker almost always got the spotlight.^[34] Seeking a more popular readership, The Crescent had found a formula that apparently worked: as its editors dictated changes in content and format over the next two decades, this feature remained. Perhaps it sparked instant interest, for The Selected followed suit, launching its own series in December 1893 with a life of Egyptian educator ‘‘Alī Mubārak (1823–93). But in The Crescent's first issue, Maria Morgan was relegated to page 28.^[35] It is hard not to see the steady stream of “Famous Women” in early women's magazines as a riposte to general-interest magazines' concept of history as a parade of male actors, especially since women's magazine subjects were often as prominently positioned as the men of The Crescent, directly under the masthead. Their headings echoed the rubric of The Crescent, too, yet it seems significant that most women's magazines after The Young Woman chose the feminine plural adjectival form shahīrāt over the masculine (“inclusive”) mashāhīr that had been used in nineteenthcentury biographical dictionaries of women. In positioning and heading, biographies in women's magazines announced a response to “malestream” history.

No longer relegated to the back pages,^[36] no longer encompassed by the “Home Management” section, women's biography in the women's press gave domesticity a sustained centrality—and interrogation—that it did not have in these general-interest magazines.^[37] Morgan's biography, (re)appearing in The Young Woman, was among a minority of biographies that gave domesticity short shrift. Published in the earliest women's journal, it upheld a tentative move toward utilizing women's life histories in the service of new agendas, signaled in Hind Nawfal's prefatory editorial when she invoked historical precedents for women standing proud: Jeanne d'Arc, Hypatia, al-Khansā‘‘, recent French journalists, and ancient Egyptian pharaohs.^[38]

Nawfal's biographies tended to be very condensed. But The Young Woman's longest biography, “Her Majesty the Empress of Russia,” gave domesticity pride of place. In fact, The Young Woman's fullest statement of domesticity is its biography of Maria Theodorovna.^[39] Perhaps we should ask: What else could a women's magazine do? As the Personal Narratives Group has written, “Women's personal narratives are, among other things, stories of how women negotiate their 'exceptional' gender status both in their daily lives and over the course of a lifetime. They assume that one can understand the life only if one takes into account gender roles and gender expectations. Whether she has accepted the norms or defied them, a woman's life can never be written taking gender for granted.”^[40] According to Linda Kerber, Revolution-era American women were hampered by a lack of role models from an immediate and local past that could justify through precedence women's political involvement; but useful role models had to mediate between multiple exigencies, strategies, and desires. “What American women needed—not least for rhetorical purposes—was an example of a woman of substantive intellectual accomplishment who had not rejected the domestic world when she moved into the public one.”^[41] Domesticity had to position extradomesticity. Newton makes the point that writers of domestic manuals in England could situate their own nondomestic pursuits in a “female” sphere by emphasizing the domestic sphere as a professional space for all (middle-class) women.^[42] Responding to the realities of its women readers' (and editors') lives as positioned in the domestic, the women's press in Egypt could highlight the gendered nature of experience by foregrounding the domestic as one domain—but not the domain—of women's lived experience, creating a slippage both productive and confining. The few biographies attributed to female authors in alMuqtataf—women associated with its male founder-editors, women who had to negotiate constantly in their own lives between their reading, writing, and public activities on the one hand and their duties to husbands, households, and offspring on the other—prepare the way when they construct that negotiation as shaping a woman's life. Other biographies elide this element but implicitly acknowledge it by their siting in “Home Management.”

Yet this was also a question of time. In 1890s Egypt, “Home Management” as female work was still an emergent construct, even though, as I have said, it could echo the “household management” of earlier, elite Arab or Muslim women, which encompassed quite a different (although not wholly dissimilar) set of duties than those implied in turn-of-thecentury lives. Fawwāz had mentioned tadbīr al-manzil with reference to very few women, elaborating it most when she defended her Turkish peer Fatma Aliye against anticipated accusations of neglect to female duty (this chapter's epigraph). But her entry on Mary Sophia of Russia vocalizes the praiseworthy domestic competence that would saturate women's magazines:

Daughter to the King of Denmark, sister of the Empress of Austria and the Princess of Wales, . . . wife of the heir to the English throne, she is princess of this era's women, their literary light in this day and age. Simply raised in her father's home, no more extravagantly than those of middling economic status among the world's women, beginning in her youth she expelled all arrogance and haughtiness. Thus is she to this day, when her position is such that about one hundred million necks bow before her. God augmented her glory and perfection with natural talents; she is very gentle, sweet, and mild-tempered. Even more amply provided is she with a good mind, a sharp intellect, an ability to perceive and call things as they are, and good intuitive grasp. God distributed to her gentle frame a strength and courage rare and precious in the strongest of men. One of the noble aspects of her nature is that she loves His Majesty the Emperor her husband greatly; she has a propensity for doing good and urging learning, and she does not like to interfere much in matters of politics. She is intent on action and absolutely detests laziness and the indolent. She loves to read useful books, and sews most of her clothes with her own hands, revealing a certain unpretentiousness in her noble self. She does not like extravagance and waste. With the help of one excellent woman she herself educates her three sons and two daughters. Drawn to lessons and reading, she has reached the point where she speaks several languages. In sum, her noble attributes make her an exemplary lesson and warning for women of the world without exception: one that returns arrogant women to humble mildness, the lethargic to activity and initiative, the extravagant to economy, the uncharitable to the love and performance of good deeds.^[43]

In the women's press, this constellation of competence, constant occupation, thrift, modesty, and restrained pride would become embodied in one “Famous Woman” after another. As an emerging motif in Egypt, female domestic identity was more consistent and textually pivotal in twentieth-century magazines than it had been in Fawwāz's volume or other nineteenth=century works. For example, while Fawwāz described at length Maryam Nahhās's biographical dictionary and obstacles she encountered in writing it, Fatāt al-sharq (unusually, citing its life of Nahhās as “from al-Durr al-manthuūr”) omitted much of Fawwāz's narrative on the dictionary to focus on family: “She was a fine litterateur and an eloquent writer, and her devotion to knowledge and literature was no less than her interest in managing her household and raising her children properly.” This allows the magazine—writing at least a dozen years after Fawwāz—to mention Nahhās's two daughters, Sara and Hind, “who have become famous for knowledge and literature/refinement; to their names they have many writings which show the eminence of their upbringing and the breadth of her [sic] knowledge.” In one sentence, the magazine praises three women, asserts the mother's literary ability, and assures readers of her continuing maternal focus, evident in her daughters' literary prowess rather than in her own biographical dictionary!^[44]

Negotiating Domesticity

If readers of The Gentle Sex in 1910 learned that Jane Austen “is considered to be in the ranks of England's greatest novelists” and that her father showed inordinate concern (for his time and place) in her education, they also learned that “she skillfully practiced many kinds of handwork.”^[45] Lebanese charity patron Admā Sursuq echoed the well-rounded training Austen is praised for upholding: “She was superb in the Arabic and French tongues and perfected many sorts of handwork.”^[46] Needlework takes on a metaphorical function, standing in for a set of gendered and classed expectations, signaling an appropriation of modern middle-class European womanhood that was to center on creating beauty and maintaining thrift in the (urban, middle-class, European-furnished) home.^[47] Needlework could represent local histories of feminine identity and work; but the needlework in biography, as in women's-magazine patterns, was not the needlework of village or Bedouin women crafting their intricately decorated robes.

Repeatedly, and until at least the mid-1930s, the great majority of biographical sketches present home, “handwork,” and family as the central and indivisible concerns of “Famous Women.” Biographers rank a woman's occupations through the discursive organization of a life. The domestic comes first; other pursuits follow. The biography of Maria Agnesi in Woman in Islam begins not with her scholarly work but with her love and loyalty to her family as well as her domestic abilities: “She performed her household duties to perfection,” we learn, before we hear of her renown in the sciences.^[48]This Agnesi is exemplary: approving of her “simplicity,” the writer calls her a “great model.” “Famous Women” lives yoke exemplarity to the primacy of domestic responsibility as a welcomed, often eagerly sought, presence in married women's (and unmarried daughters') lives. Sursuq was exemplary not only because she served and fed the sick “with her own beautiful hands” but also because she epitomized the good wife and mother, so efficient she had time to sew clothes for the poor. From this happy example the author draws a lesson:

We have related her life history, and those of [other] fine eastern women, to immortalize their feats and to stimulate the interest of the many women who spend their lives working to drain their husbands' blood and destroy their children's manners through superstitions, foolishness, gossip, gambling, and other trivialities. . . . Our aim in publishing deeds of worthy women extends to elucidating their excellence in a tangible way that will catch [people's] attention and make an impact on their minds. Could we but say that a single one of the middleclass women who get their clothes from the seamstress and delegate the business of caring for their homes and children to servants (unconcerned by the distress this will cause their husbands, the grief it will instill in their children, and the wear and tear it will visit on their homes), could we but say that she had studied the acts of the subject of this biography, especially her leisuretime pursuits, then would she not feel ashamed, upon comparing them with her own acts? Would she not see in herself a flaw compared to that good woman, wholeheartedly engaged in sewing clothes for the poor? Would she not blame herself for killing valuable time uselessly and sacrificing money for needless aims? Surely she would. . . . God, we ask to be led to what is best and beneficial for daughters of our kind. Then will we reckon that we have taken a step forward and have placed a cornerstone in the foundation of women's progress.^[49]

Domesticity, practiced assiduously and passed on to others, was the “cornerstone” of women's “progress” and therefore, hinted biographies, of the nation's. It shaped and defined women's other contributions. The biography of Maria Mitchell in Young Woman of the East put the domestic squarely first. Mitchell “used to prepare the food, wash the pots and pans, do her sewing and embroidery, and after that dedicate herself to studying scientific and astronomical writings.”^[50] Fawwāz, writing the life of Mitchell, had reversed the order but still inserted the domestic centrally into the subject's educational pursuits: “She had a strong inclination toward the mathematical sciences and she excelled in them even as she undertook the housework, washing the dishes and so forth. But her father did not try to turn her away from her natural inclinations.” In her essays Fawwāz stressed that women must have the option to train for work outside the home. Recall that her own working background diverged utterly from that of early women's magazine editors, able to depend on the income of male family members. Although Fawwāz was quick to note that Mitchell's studies did not keep her from the kitchen, by opposing “housework” and “natural inclinations” she subtly undermined the notion that women's work and domesticity were identical or even essentially linked. But strategically women had to balance the two: “[Mitchell] used to say that woman can learn seven languages as she works with her hands in sewing and embroidery. . . . [As director of the local public library] she would often make socks by hand while the book lay open before her.”^[51] Perhaps because Yāqūt Sarrūf had authored The Selected's biography of Mitchell, this version of her life also narrated her baking and tatting. After all, readers found her in the “Home Management” column.

American writer Helen Hunt Jackson “combined managing home and family, conversing with writers, and holding the reed pen, with magnanimity and scope, as the finest woman does. . . . Her passions were writing, reading, and managing the family.”^[52] Christini Hindiyya (d. 1924), Egyptian Armenian spouse of famous bookseller and printer Amīī;n Effendi Hindiyya and graduate of a convent school, excelled in the French language and “through hard effort” learned Italian and Arabic, “not to mention her own Armenian tongue.” Yet for what is she exemplary? Mother of four children, “she brought them up on the most perfect paradigm of virtue and excellent manners. Thus was she a fine paragon for the mothers in whom nations take pride, just as she was a model of the good wife and wise homemaker, from whom spread the rays of joy and sympathy to benefit her own, to brush away from them the clouds of domestic events and to remove family sorrows and weariness.” It is not surprising to find such superlatives in an obituary (“she based her life on performance of duty and service to humanity, and no wonder hearts begin weeping for her before eyes can even grow full”). But it is instructive to see her linguistic attainments overwhelmed by her “model” performance as wife, mother, and charity patron.^[53] And in any case, facility at language was as much the marker of an accomplished and appropriate upper-middle-class wife as it was a sign of intellectual prowess.

Similarly, if Hannā‘‘ Kūrānīī; was, for Jurjīī; Bāz, “the pride of Syrian womanhood,” perhaps it was not just her literary remains that would “encourage one to take her as a model.” She worked to change stereotypes of “Eastern women” by giving speeches in North America and tried “to improve the situation of the girls of her kind.” But as Bāz describes her as speaker and writer, he has something to add: “Even with her absorption in writing, speaking, and studying, she engaged herself in handwork and was a perfect homemaker, except that she was not happy in her marital life because she was not given children.” A defensive note creeps into characterization of her career: “She spent her years on behalf of that which a young woman does after she has completed her womanly duties.”^[54] If Bāz makes the point that Kūrānīī; tried in North America to earn her own living “through self-reliance, without needing a husband or brother,” he constructs a female public working life within the priority of domestic “duty.”^[55]

The more public the woman, the more forcefully the point needed to be made. The biographies of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Young Woman of the East both describe her activism as the outcome of terrible gender discrimination—“she burned with zeal for the daughters of her kind.” But both also end by recuperating the domestic role: “With all of the great works and beneficial efforts this woman achieved, she did not neglect her household duties or the raising of her two daughters and seven sons. Indeed, she raised them on the firmest kind of disciplined training.” In the earlier biography, foregrounding the domestic does allow the text to articulate another outcome. Stanton “taught her daughters, like her sons, occupations by which they could make a living when in need. Often she spoke and wrote urging that girls be taught honorable trades so they would not become burdens on others. Her words were well-received, and American women's inclinations turned to teaching the arts and working outside the home.” But a decade later, the second life of Stanton ended on an unequivocally domestic note, while not mentioning Stanton's daughters: “She was blessed with seven boys whose upbringing she undertook in the best possible manner. Her public efforts did not distract her from her domestic duties.” The proclamation rings louder for its insertion in an uncompromising narrative trajectory, from portrayal of Stanton's father as openly preferring his son to the historicization of her struggle: “In her time women were treated in a humiliating way and oppressed. They had no rights equivalent to men's. This stirred up sāhibat al-tarjama's soul, filling her breast with rancor toward the tyrannous men of her nation.”^[56]

It is an emphasis that ranges across societies and times. British birth control campaigner Marie Stopes (1880–1958), described as an energetic scholar, speaker, and suffragist, “with her devotion to science and occupation in teaching, writing, and speech making, undertook every aspect of her household duties and sewed her clothes with her own hand. It was reported that she said a woman can do many things besides managing her household if she schedules every occupation.” Thus ends her life history, on a didactic note that has nothing (directly) to do with the source of Stopes's fame.^[57] Similarly, Mariyānā Marrāsh's learning “did not distract her from her domestic duties; she was an exemplar in comportment and household management, a good wife and wise mother.”^[58] If one life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) praises her marriage as the epitome of a companionate relationship (“constant tending, compassion, and mutual sacrifice between that married pair attained their ultimate meaning”), another declares that study and focused reading did not turn her away from domestic duty or charity. This is one biography among many that link exemplary personal and domestic life to the fulfillment of social duty.^[59] When Hind Nawfal published a life of Warda al-Yāzijī, it was not just poetic skill but also her “consummate” child rearing and “utterly simple” way of life that were exemplary.^[60] Adelheid Popp's biography, unusually, states that her husband helped her, reversing the usual lines of authority found in these texts. But the domestic cannot be completely elided: “Her interest in [the issue of] unions for female workers and their protection grew, despite her painstaking attention to her interior space [dākhiliyyatihā, her domestic space], husband, and children.”^[61] And the essay “The History of the Feminist Movement in Britain,” published in Young Woman of the East in 1930, segues into a biography of Emmeline Pankhurst after critically comparing contemporary French feminists' capitulation before the “tenaciousness” of their legislature to the “fatigue and misery” brooked by feminists in Britain.^[62] The biography does privilege public political action. The English feminists believed “they would never have their complete rights if they were not specifically said to have political equality with men, and there was no way they could achieve this while staying within legal means, so they went out into the streets and began smashing window fronts.” But simultaneously it positions Pankhurst resolutely between husband and children. Narrating her education and growing awareness of gender inequality, the text characterizes her marriage as one of “complete harmony and tranquillity; she had five children with whose upbringing she was wonderfully concerned, but even with her interest in her children she would devote herself to working on social issues, for her husband had sown these seeds in her mind.” Marriage assumes centrality both as a time-consuming occupation and as the source of her inspiration to pursue political work. But as the text unrolls again from individual into a hint of collective biography, the text fixes on Pankhurst's leadership in decision making. As the educative homemaker motif appears to justify her public work, the level of detail about suffragists' political actions, including hunger strikes, makes overt editorial comment unnecessary and intimates sympathy between writer and subject(s).^[63]

These exemplary portraits as prescriptive texts stressed the positive. However, an intermittent proscriptive note invaded biographies to further instill the primacy of domesticity. Negative assessments of individual women's assays into public life, rare as they are in biographies (unlike other texts in the same journals), suggested that new pursuits could go only so far. They hinted at ambivalence, even hostility, about redefining gendered divisions of labor, just as the insistence in one biography after another that public life had not hindered domestic energy might. But we must recall, too, that this was a tactic by which magazines could mount a critique of modernity as defined in the changing social practices of “the West” in order to insert a locally moderated modernity instead. If the construction of domesticity as a privileged female sphere owed much to European social thought, one way the construction could be claimed locally was to assert Western women's dangerous deviation from it even while repeatedly protesting their adherence. Putting the domestic first, biographies declared that “Famous Women” of the West (Isabel Burton, Maria Mitchell, Marie de Sévigné, Sarah Bernhardt, Manon Roland) did not allow public careers to impinge upon “womanly” duties to home management, husband, and children. Celebrating initiative in learning and work, biographies countered critiques of Western women's trajectories even as they criticized the destinations to which these paths might lead. Yet when the Ladies' and Girls' Revue declared Lucy Stone its first biographical subject because she was “first to call for restitution of women's rights in America,” and went on to narrate Stone's defiance of her family and her public activism, still it concluded that her work

has had an impact on American women's thinking. We see the results in the way they have “burst forth.” But we think such unrestrained movement is not devoid of serious harm even if it carries great benefits . . . to wit, that society can draw on the energy, seriousness, and strengths of half of humanity. . . . For women have talents men do not possess. The harms enter in the disturbance this causes to the family system, when a woman leaves her house for the crush of business, where she will not find herself honored and respected as she is in the home—not to mention her neglect of children and household.

This is the “tough call”—public activism versus “children and household”—that the magazine asks readers to debate in letters to the editor, in its mission to define models of “virtue and goodness . . . and performance of duty.”^[64] Yet its own intervention proactively shapes those responses as it warns of a loss of “respect.” The question mark that lay between narrating a public life and prescribing a reader's life is evident here within the text; it mirrors an ambiguity in the larger corpus of the individual who wrote most of this journal's biographies. In his journal al-Jāmi‘‘a, founded after he immigrated to Alexandria in 1897, Farah Antūn discussed female education at length, questioning the right to access training that might lead to extradomestic pursuits.^[65] Yet biographies Antūn published in his sister's magazine could have encouraged readers to envision lives outside the domestic ambit.

Other biographies are explicit about fears—or accusations—that might shadow the visibly active woman. The Selected's biography of Isabel Arundel Burton (1831–96) had (unusually) privileged and celebrated her wifely role. In the Egyptian Woman's Magazine some years later, a biography alluded to the anxieties that women's multiple activities and desires might engender before insisting that Burton's example undermined any such worry:

The one who studies the . . . deeds of this vigorous lady will wonder whether she had enough time left to concern herself with her marital duties and household occupations. Indeed, some might imagine that the knowledge and ability given to her, and the valuable aid she has given her husband, would encourage her to rebel against him or to neglect his domestic needs. [They might imagine] that since she occupied herself with many important matters outside her home she could not pay heed to her internal affairs and might feel they were below her. Or [they might think] the frequency with which she mixed with important people, foreigners and locals, engaged her to the exclusion of the little Burtons' needs.^[66] But none of these fancies has any basis in fact. Lady Burton neglected not a single one of woman's duties. She directed the affairs of her household decisively and wisely, and attended to the minutiae of her servants' work. Her care embraced her horses and garden, where she normally spent part of every day, working with her hands.

As for her husband, he was virtually her idol. She spared no effort for his comfort and contentment, just as she was his right hand in most of his work. Whatever time she had left she spent partly in exchanging visits with local women, with whom she enjoyed conversing about family matters, enlightening their minds and broadening their understanding.^[67]

Burton's exemplary domesticity makes her the perfect reformer, “enlightening” women around her. Surely the message would not have been lost on privileged readers in Egypt, surrounded on their ‘‘izbas (agricultural estates) by the equivalent of tenant farmers' families.^[68]

To privilege women's domestic work was to satisfy more than one agenda. It reassured critics that women were not deserting the home. It helped construct the emerging model of the trained housewife as essential to an ideal nuclear family (separated from the extended kin group, harmonious through companionate marriage, bringing up well-trained, obedient, actively patriotic male children), and as crucial to the management of society in its class divisions. Articulating new ways to organize home life, the focus on home management might discreetly defuse conservative opposition to new career paths. For “many women's personal narratives unfold within the framework of an apparent acceptance of social norms and expectations but nevertheless describe strategies and activities that challenge those same norms.”^[69] Perhaps such biographies gave female readers enhanced self-esteem as they evaluated their own domestic skills. Perhaps these texts contributed, with other factors, to giving women a sense of enhanced power even if within a circumscribed sphere. As Glenna Matthews notes, “When a culture enshrines the home and the moral authority of the mother to the extent that American culture did in the mid–nineteenth century, a wife has a rationale for advancing her claims.”^[70] Although it is important to be careful to not claim too much for the power that domestic authority could confer, it is also important to recognize that a greater sense of authority—and the ambiguities this could conjure—might lead to expanded dreams. For the domestic ideal itself, stressing learned competence yet justifying it by reference to women's “natural” faculties, harbored contradictions. Even as traditional epithets buttressed women's inscription in the domestic, the “Famous Women” biographies provide one more warning that the role of the domestic in discourses on women, especially in emerging feminist discourses, is open to question. When domesticity is constructed as a privileged site giving women special powers, foregrounding and then conscripting a moral precedence linked to home management and motherhood, does this simply enhance women's place in the home, or does it begin to displace the notion of home? Does it confine women's authority or construct a basis for new ways of thinking and acting? For Egypt, Baron has argued that the early women's press was at the center of a “new ideology of domesticity [that] gave women greater responsibility in the home without challenging its boundaries.” Badran emphasizes a clear break between “the cult of domesticity” and emerging feminisms.^[71] Neither viewpoint quite incorporates the productive contradictions and ambiguities that domesticity as a learned ideal, and then biography as a signifier of uneven accommodations between lives and discourses, both generated and masked.

Of Ballooning and Feminism

Claiming the domestic as an arena of initiative and strength might have unexpected consequences, hinted a 1914 biography in The Gentle Sex of French balloonist Sophie Blanchard (d. 1819) and a 1917 biography in Young Woman of the East of American feminist Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927). Blanchard's biography opens with a declaration that could have come out of a mid-Victorian English domestic manual (perhaps it did): “Life is beauty. And woman is the beauty in life, a flower that buds in earthly life's garden to adorn the lifetime of man. She is multiple meanings, all pure and marvelous; in her smiles resides a light that dissipates the darkness of trials and strengthens the faltering step.”^[72] This preface echoes the volume's opening editorial, two pages earlier, which called the magazine “a ripening flower that strives and works for what holds the good of the nation.”^[73] The metaphor constructed a link between women's acts and the nation, between domestic and national duty. Yet this “flower” was not all sweetness and light. “Yes, she is sweetest when she knows her duty and understands her life's aim, when she exemplifies boldness and courage. It pleases us to acquaint our women readers with a lady who was an example of determination and courage. We mean Madame Blanchard—this lady who became famous with her husband Blanchard for flying.”^[74] The image of marriage constructed in this biography questions even as it celebrates the ideal of companionate marriage. Blanchard is shown to be supportive to her balloonist and inventor husband's aims even as a widow poverty-stricken by the late Jean-Pierre François Blanchard's (1753–1809) consuming passion for aviation.^[75] “She was determined to follow in the path he had trod and so she began to ascend in the air.”^[76] For it was after his death that she became a famous aviator in her own right, whom crowds flocked to see. Moreover, according to this biography, she earned back the money he had lost with her narrow escapes and daring fireworks displays in midflight. Widowed, Blanchard displaces the male wage earner without upsetting the structure of differential gendered roles. Yet her own rise to fame subverts the ideal of informed domesticity spelled out in the opening lines.

But it is the domestic that provides a parting word of advice. The narrative that ends with Blanchard's dramatic death moves into a finale that recapitulates the opening, framing the didactic message of this life history within the four walls of domesticity.

Then the ropes that bound the balloon chamber where she sat burned and it plummeted, and so Madame Blanchard fell onto a city roof and thence to the ground, and died instantly. Thus ended that life so replete with persistence and occupation. We hope our women will learn an exemplary lesson [umthuūla] of perseverance and endurance from Madame Blanchard in the occupations for which they were created, and the duties assigned them as daughters, mothers, and wives.^[77]

Women are to elicit an example, but only of “perseverance.” They are to turn this example to good use in their domestically defined roles, dictated by God and nature. But the double resonance of umthuūla—as “example” and as “warning”—and the conjunction separating “occupations” and “duties” hint at the potentially multiple meanings of this life for readers. Reading perseverance in Sophie Blanchard's life, might schoolgirls have dreamed an ascent into the air?

The biography of Victoria Woodhull in Young Woman of the East solicits rather than exceeds the domestic sphere; yet here again, silences in the narrative might propose more than one path into the future for young female readers. Praising Woodhull's reformist tenacity as she faced vociferous opposition, and describing her commercial success at banking, the text takes a stance: “Because every reformer has enemies and persecutors who oppose him out of fanatic partiality for the old, the subject of the biography and her sister had many persecutors.” Narrating her activity on behalf of women's “national rights” (huquūq wataniyya) and in the process assuming the legitimacy of women's political rights as citizens, the text does not expound Woodhull's agenda or her belief in personal and sexual freedom. It characterizes her “free principles” as centered on curriculum for girls' schools, “drawing parents' and teachers' attention to the imperative of concerning themselves with preparing the girl to be mistress of a home and raiser of children, and not to let her restrict herself to adornment and showiness as she was doing at that time.” This gives a specific content to the biography's opening statement:

On the occasion of the present women's awakening and the equality of Western women with men that has emerged from it—their [Western women] acquiring their national and social rights in total—we decided to publish a biography of Victoria Woodhull the American. For she was among those who set the cornerstone in the foundation of women's progress and freedom. Her sister, Tennessee Clavin, worked with her; they strived in a most excellent manner to give visibility to women's capability and readiness for equality with men.^[78]

The text privileges a female curriculum that defines women by informed domesticity. But the narrated lives of Woodhull and Clavin as independent, fearless activists (even with the text's biographical ellipses) pose multiple possibilities.

Regal Chores

Ironically, given the fact of colonial power relations, European monarchs were serviceable exemplars in this sphere, too. Being queen did not affect Alexandra of England's (1845–1925) regard for domestic matters, said a biography published following Edward VII's death in 1910 (an article on her displaces an obituary for him). Nor did it keep her from reproducing this system—from “training her daughters in the occupations of the home.”^[79] Like other royals, Alexandra is celebrated for her exemplary domesticity. Perhaps the writer assumed that those who could read (or afford) the magazine were sufficiently au courant with public life in England to situate her domesticity in the context of her public visibility as princess of Wales for thirty-seven years, queen for nine, and—by the time of her obituarybiography in Young Woman of the East—queen mother for another decade and a half. The sketch articulates a theme that resounds through the genre and the women's magazines overall, the mutually constitutive and almost sacred intersection of domesticity and nation: “God give her great mercy and multiply her likes among women working for the good of nations.” What sort of working woman was the deity to multiply? “Queen Alexandra undertook her children's tarbiya in the best manner. She trained her children in house management and handwork, and therefore was the finest of models for mothers and homemakers, especially since she herself did much of the work, sewing clothes and the like for the poor and orphans. She pushed the women of her court to assist her in this, and from them that spirit was propagated to the rest of the women of her [sic] kingdom.” Modesty and simplicity, qualities emphasized throughout the “Famous Women” biographies, are key components. “The grandeur and brilliance of rule did not match the modesty and gentleness of this queen, with her concern for her family. From the height of her glory she supervised the tiniest domestic details, concerning herself especially with her husband's comfort and her children's close supervision.” As in biographies of premodern Arab women, anecdotes tell the tale; and “there were many such events all of which indicate that she was a competent mistress of the household, an excellent wife, and a wise woman, just as she was a great charity patron.”^[80] Note the order.

As biographies of royals construct blueprints for women, they offer the portrait of an ideal family, simultaneously confirming the notion of the family as microcosm of the nation. In a joint 1898 biography of “Emperor William and His Wife,” the Sociable Companion begins with him, a rarity in these biographies (until the 1930s, as we shall see). After describing William's education, training, and public duties, the text notes that “despite [his occupation with matters of state] he is a consummate father, who perfectly fulfills fatherhood's criteria, and [shows] compassion in raising his children and undertaking their education and training in the finest manner.”^[81] Six pages of him, and then the biography moves to her. Famous before her marriage for “beauty, good comportment, and fine morals,” Augusta Victoria (1858–1922) did not disappoint, continuing to exhibit “virtues and praiseworthy qualities” (and bearing seven children).

But it is the royal family's daily schedule that forms the text's truly exemplary figure. Their life is “utterly simple and free of pretension. They all arise early and eat breakfast together at one table. The children go to their lessons, the emperor to meet his ministers, and the empress to manage her home.” If the text adduces her “love of useful books and music” and charity activities, it is the domestic realm that makes her exemplary, and that subsumes the rest. And the authority she accrues is infinitely expandable:

We have published [her life] in our women's magazine solely as a guide to the daughters and ladies [i.e., unmarried and married females] of our East, as a token of this fine empress's excellence. . . . If her desire lay in being the greatest empress on earth she would be, for Germany is a great and able state. If it lay in being a wife and a mother akin to the finest mothers of this age she would be, for there is no one more delicate, compassionate and gentle in handling [people] and managing the upbringing of her seven children whose training she assumed herself. This is why they emerged with the noblest morals imprinted in their souls, the most heightened senses of delicacy and responsibility sketched on their consciences, fit to be models for the children of monarchs, therefore for everyone on earth who wishes to be characterized by the finest traits and noblest morals.

Moreover this empress—despite her glory, her honor, and the hundreds of servants she has—assumes the work of her home by herself, like a wise and virtuous woman. She likes to know the state of everything in her home so she can prove to the world's women that a woman must not let anything divert her from the conditions of her household. For this home, whether that of a mighty emperor or a small peasant, is a metaphor for a kingdom that must be run and cared for; its head [ra’ءīs] must himself be its guardian and caretaker [walī], always aware of how everything is proceeding. This is contrary to what we witness in the rich women among us whom God blessed with wealth but kept from having intelligence and good comportment, such that they left their homes to servants to dispose of as they wished, and the honor of those homes became dependent on the will of the servants. . . . Were you to ask one of the rich women among us about the state of her household in any detail, she would imagine you were insulting her . . . and would assert that this is not her business, but is one of those inferior matters that the lowly servants handle. But the great empress is proud that she runs her household herself and raises her own children, bringing all her powers and efforts to bear. No gambling pulls her away from her children, for she is too dignified to allow a dīnār to touch her little finger except when she is giving it to a poor person in need. She does not take the sort of interest in clothes that would keep her from paying attention to her daughters. She wears things only of the proper simplicity and does not practice deception for the sake of beauty as do most wealthy women; she has sufficed with the beauty God gave her and the jewelry of glory and true honor, and has done without other adornment. . . .

She does not act so because she feels unimportant or inferior . . . but rather so she can be a sound model [qudwa sāliha] for women. Thus, if a woman wants visible corroboration in matters of home, husband, and children, she can look and see the empress of Germany herself doing likewise, and she will know that duty is thus. For a person relies on the great to provide a model, and finds there the most wonderful justification. . . . And how suited are our wealthy women in this poor country to take as a model Her Majesty the Empress Augusta: to be honorable women when that is appropriate, mothers when it is the time to mother, raisers of children when it is the time to nurse [murabbiyyāt hīn al-radā‘‘a], those who train and refine when it is the time to educate, servers in the home when it is the time to hold no confidence in a servant. Then, after that, they [fem.] can provide a model to the poor, who will act as they do . . . instead of seeing them in their finery and therefore considering them an enemy.

So let our women be like the empress and our men like the emperor, and felicity and happiness will be ours.^[82]

The power of this image emerges in its transference to a very different socioeconomic context, for the role model constructed by the empress's biography is not so different than the message suggested in a portrayal of the childhood of Greta Garbo (b. 1905). Her father's income was low, but through “his wise wife's good management” it sufficed to support the family.

Her mother was a fine, energetic woman who took the strongest of interest in cleaning her house, cooking her food, sewing her clothes and those of her children with her own hand. She expended her husband's small income with wisdom and economy so the family would lack none of life's necessities. Thus all were content with that wholesome life in its remoteness from luxury's motives, and love fluttered its wings of harmony and contentment among this family's members. When the food was gone, you would see the mother going to wash the dishes, Greta and her sister at her side helping her by drying and putting them away, then each heading silently for her own bed.^[83]

Biographies that offered such model “typical” days were giving narrative form to magazine articles, conduct literature, and housekeeping manuals such as Malaka Sa‘‘d's Mistress of the Home.^[84] Women were to become the family clocks; biographical subjects personified a new, “modern,” attitude toward and management of time. Women were to internalize a disciplinary schedule based on the demands of the public work of husbands, in an “efficient” gendered division of labor.^[85] Biography suited this didactic demand: it pleasantly offered a material outline for the flood of instructions now visited on female readers.

To position hands-on domesticity as that which centrally structured lives of women rulers and royal spouses from Nefertari to Victoria was to insist that the link between women and domestic duty could not be shattered by either class or the most overt kinds of status and power. That this was a preoccupation of the press in the context of the prevalent discourse on how women's duty to the nation must be channeled is suggested by the divergence between Fawwāz's biography of Queen Victoria and Fatāt al-sharq's, some fifteen years later (1910), which contain some long identical passages. Both emphasize her strong training; the magazine stresses that she saw this as “duty.” The magazine, not Fawwāz, calls her “simple in her dress.” Most telling, while Fawwāz ends by describing Albert's efforts to develop education in general, the magazine ends with a physical and “moral” description of Victoria that privileges the hands-on maternal role and her charity interests. It ends with a statement not found in Scattered Pearls: “And thus was this queen a skilled and knowledgeable person, a fine wife, an excellent mother, and an organized mistress of the home—as she was a great queen.”^[86] Again, note the order. Another biography of Victoria in Young Woman of the East (1922) emphasizes her political and social reforms in the name of empire. Yet the finale privileges another message: “In all stages of her life the queen was a sound and fitting example to the daughters of her kind; for the occupations of queen did not turn her away from the duties of wife and mother; rather, in her domestic life she was a model for girls, wives, and mothers, as she was in her political life a model for kings and queens.”^[87] The monarch's exemplary home life is to inform the nonroyal female's domestic self-definition, as her persona furthers the discursive division between ruler and ruled, private and public. Of course, in England and throughout the West, Victoria played this role.

Yet biographical deployments of the domestic also offered a warning that women's domestic work was not a suitable pretext for constraining their public lives. Victoria's daughter Victoria, empress of Germany (1840–1901), had devoted herself to study from an early age, emphasized her biography. After her marriage, as described in chapter 4, she had read, drawn, etched, studied philosophy and economics, and translated and written books “that explicated Germany's hopes . . . then she researched the relationship between politics and religion, showing with clear proofs the necessity of separating the authority of church and state. She wrote a book on the duties of ministers in a constitutional state which made an impact in her country.” She may have done all this at home, but her activities put her in the public eye: many criticized her involvement in politics and scholarship, as well as her vocal support for constitutionalism, “as if such was not suitable for a princess.” Years later, her son sought her counsel frequently, noted the biography: “If God had lengthened her days into 1914, with her influence she could have gotten her son to change the course of politics, saving the world from the disasters and horrors of the Great War.” But inserted at the center of this text we find: “Her occupation with literature did not distract her from her household duties. Her private correspondence indicates the efforts she made to reduce household expenses below the income she and her husband brought in.”^[88] One profile after another stresses that domestic duty does not deter women from intellectual and professional pursuits. Labība Hāshim's first article for The Sociable Companion seems a prescient outline of “Famous Women” rhetoric, not in Avierino's journal so much as in her own later Young Woman of the East. If married women have no free time, she declared, household duties need not keep them from small projects—literature or charity.^[89] The only difference between this advice and the thrust of magazine biographies was that “Famous Women's” projects tended not to be “small.” Adelheid Popp's activism was not slowed by home and family, her biographer marveled.^[90] Lucy Stone's “duties to her son and family did not keep her from maintaining her agenda of research and speech making.”^[91] Such reminders operated a subtle but important shift from biographies that stressed merely the centrality of domesticity. The confrontational work of the divorced and childless Zaynab Fawwāz did not mean she ignored the dust balls, but the dust balls did not keep her from her literary pursuits, either:

One of this fine woman's unique qualities is her love for the daughters of her kind, her ready defense of them at every turn. Often she has debated the men writers and litterateurs on this, desirous of strengthening Eastern woman's condition and preparing the way for her advance. On top of this, she is attractive of appearance, sweet of speech, enjoyable in her presence, far removed from pretension or arrogance. She avoids affectedness and flattery in conversation and is among the very finest mistresses of the home in knowledge, training, and consummate skill.

Yet her performance of these womanly duties has not kept her from working in the literary arts, as witnessed by her many compositions. . . . Her hard toil is evident, the valuable time this work of hers has taken over and above her household duties. . . . May God increase her likes.^[92]

Rarely is attention to the household presented as an obstacle. ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr's marriage did not prevent her from acquiring learning, says a biography in The Belles.^[93] But if many, many biographies protest that domestic duty does not hinder a woman's immersion in intellectual interests, a few do hint that domestic responsibilities and a husband's expectations could restrict a subject's ability to engage in intellectual or professional pursuits. Perhaps this was the ultimate message of Hāshim's “small projects.” As Matthews notes, nineteenth-century female activists in the United States who took the domestic sphere as the site of moral authority “did not assume that there was any contradiction between activism and devotion to the home.”^[94] At the same time, the real constraints and tensions of real lives might challenge this assumption: “The new roles for the home and the new female activism generated both a heady sense of possibilities and uneasiness, sometimes coexisting in the same person.”^[95] In another biography of ‘‘A’ءisha Taymūr, “household tasks prevented her from devoting herself to learning and literature.”^[96] And recall Fawwāz on Aliye.

Explicit mention of household work marks biographies of contemporary Arab women—like Fawwāz and Taymūr—and women of the West. Very rarely does it structure biographies of Arab or Muslim women of the past, although their inscription within family is paramount. That many biographies of early Muslim women were reproduced verbatim or nearly so from premodern sources illustrates the novelty of this discourse of domesticity. It had not marked the premodern discursive production of premodern Arab or Muslim elite women's lives (and their own lived experiences of “domesticity” were both widely varied and very different than those of female turn-of-the-century magazine readers). Writers could allude to the “household management” of, for example, Ottoman sultans' mothers and consorts, but they were exploiting a very different context to introduce a concept of domestic duty pertinent to contemporary lives. Associated with the West, it was no less a part of young urban middle-class Arab females' new educations. Its appropriation could be cast in local cultural terms, its lineaments discussed minutely, its importance emphasized through constant discussion. In its tenth issue, inviting contributions, al-Fatāt expressed interest in “academic and literary discussions [or controversies], plus household obligation, marital rights, and various sorts of handwork.”^[97] The magazine articulated a division: polemics and intellectual work versus domestic subjects. But both were within its ambit, as “subjects concerned with strengthening excellence [or virtue] and the women's literary/moral awakening.” The moral as well as practical import of domesticity was signaled in the diction magazines deployed. From al-Fatāt on, domestic occupations are often labeled wājib or mahamma (duty or task/mission), while other occupations might be shughl or ‘‘amal (work), words that defined men's work outside the home.^[98]

Times might change, but at the end of the thirties biographies maintained their approving delineation of domestic skills while continuing to occlude the labor that actually kept middle- and upper-class households in operation.^[99] If in the United States “passivity” was the “mark of the good housewife” by the early twentieth century—for she was supposed to listen to the experts and consume the ready products of American industry^[100]—this was not the case in Egypt. Biographies (like other writings in women's magazines) sketched anxiety about the consumption patterns encouraged by the incursion of European industrial capitalism as they asserted the benefits of the disciplinary role of new patterns of domesticity that this capitalism had also helped to shape. And it depended on which consumption patterns: timesaving gadgets for the home sparked interest, while female moda (fashion), as we have seen, drew revulsion.

Yet an anxiety about defining and privileging the homemaker role may have supplied an impetus for the “woman behind the man” emphasis at a time when the visibility and vocality of women's public ambitions were growing fast. In the late 1930s, the Egyptian Woman's Magazine interlaced its “Wives of the Great” series—discussed later—with two “daughters of the great.” Megan Lloyd-George was “a skilled conversationalist, an entertaining companion, and lady of a household who knew how to run it with precise organization that mistresses of the great families envied.” Furthermore, if Lloyd-George was skilled at piano, embroidery, golf, tennis, and driving automobiles, she was also “an expert in all matters of home management.”^[101] The opening explained that Lloyd-George “united the virtues of yesterday's woman with the merits of the modern young woman” and exclaimed that it was no wonder, with her parentage, that she had been immersed in politics since an early age. But repeated mention of her house-management skills, and then of her surrogate-mother skills as an aunt, preceded and were more elaborate than the brief, carefully qualified mention of her feminist views at the end.^[102]

If female biography could take on a momentum that was frightening, the domestic might proffer a comforting antidote. And not only in Egypt. Joseph Adelman, documenting “feminine achievement through the ages” in his 1926 volume of biography, inserted a detour on “Limitations of Women,” excerpting clergyman John Todd's 1867 speech “An Old Fashioned Talk on the Woman Question.” Todd (a founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) emphasized “natural” difference based on women's “bodily organization”: “You cannot invent. You cannot compete with men in a long course of mental labor.” A woman is “queen of the home.” “Our wives perfect all that is good in us.” Adelman admitted the domestic centrally into biography through the authority of another man's words. This was how biographies of public women were to be read.^[103] In Egypt, the act of reassurance became if anything more insistent as time went on. If career women and rulers in both name and fact were exemplary from the start in women's magazines produced in Egypt, so also—and increasingly—were a panoply of stay-at-home moms (often against an anachronistic backdrop of modern domesticity) and women-behind-the-men. I see this both as an effect of the backlash against the increasingly visible political work and career ambitions of middle-class women and as one element shaped by, and shaping, post-1919 nationalist ideology. Feminist goals explicitly articulated by the EFU and by individuals clashed with the outlook of those who sought to shape the postcolonial Egyptian state.^[104] Was it complacency or worry when a writer signing himself “A Free [-Thinking?] Man” in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine expressed confidence that women in a future, independent Egypt would not “strive to be more than solely a mother and mistress of a home”?^[105] In 1922, this was a clear statement of (some, “liberal”) men's expectations. “Let men remember always,” said this free thinker, “that the Egyptian woman strives today in the arena of the nationalist movement not only to be happy but to be, before all else, free.” Some EFU women would not have agreed with his definition of either “happy” or “free” (let us not forget that hurra could still signify gendered respectability). Simultaneously, though, the rhetoric of domesticity could valorize female authority as based in but by no means limited to the home. Learned domesticity (including an efficiency that makes time for nondomestic pursuits after housework is done and children are disciplined) could operate as a sign of civic participation and national/ist contribution.

Domestic duty as a defined space, separated from yet yoked to daily pursuits not included in the domestic, was a sign of modernity for these women engaged in rewriting their own lives. Key in the formation of a modern “public” patriarchy, its explication in print—the endless circulation of domestic details and the debate over how the domestic should define girls' education—gave the domestic a public presence.^[106] It put the family at the center of national life.^[107] Domesticity, as Baron observes, could represent stability in a bewilderingly changing world, as it could argue for the public value of women's work. And it could lend support to calls for female education when coupled with the assertion that schoolgirls would learn domestic skills in the classroom.^[108] Not surprisingly, biographies of teachers and women who founded schools often emphasized their interest in teaching “home management.” Urging education for girls, said the Ladies' and Girls' Revue, was not so that a woman could teach school but rather so she could “train those around her.”^[109] Years later, as we have seen, even the teacher-oriented Young Woman of Young Egypt emphasized motherhood as the primary female occupation and spent pages on detailed advice on providing early childhood education at home.

The intensity of this debate, in the press and in many, many books targeted to women's conduct and published in this period, put women's domestic work in the spotlight as a public act for the nation. That celebrating the domestic meant something more than, or other than, simply keeping women at home is signaled in a profile that is unusual for going as far as it does to sketch a hegemonic domesticity. Adāb al-fatāt's sole extant life of a non-Western woman profiles Safīī;na ‘‘Ubayd, member of one of Egypt's most prominent Coptic families, “famous,” says the biography, for “complete obedience and utter submission” in her father's house.

Her mother was proud to say in front of others, “My daughter Safīī;na has never fatigued or upset me in all the days of my life.” When little she busied herself with all the occupations of the home despite the presence of servants [khaddāmīn wa-jawārī]. Fearing she would tire from so much work, her mother would request that she stop working so hard. But [Safīna] would say, with all affection and respect, . . . “Mama, God created me with two hands so I could work, and gave me health so I could work; and what makes me happy, mama, is to dirty my hands in the kitchen. My honor lies in cleaning and straightening the house, and my pleasure in running the household and overseeing the work of the servants. . . . ” It grieved Sayyida Safīna to see a girl show aversion to entering the kitchen and shy away from grasping the broom and duster. Often she said frankly in front of the girls at her school, “Girls, when I was a girl in the house of my father I worked at everything. I did not shy away from any household task. This is what has been of benefit to me now that I am older. So you must not simply make do with your studies, your clean clothes, and sitting before the piano, or hunching over your reading. Rather, link it all to chopping onions in the kitchen, pounding garlic and pepper and salt, becoming a skilled cook, cleaning house, and not relying on servants—because they are not forever.”

From a perfect daughter, Safīī;na became a perfect wife:

She lived with her husband in all affection and faithfulness, performing her conjugal duties so completely that he came to feel that God's greatest earthly blessing to him was his wife. . . . [When he became ill,] she dedicated her most valuable time to serving him and doing all that would make him comfortable. . . . Never did her husband enter his house to discover that she was out. Indeed, she was akin to the best European women in keeping to his regular mealtimes and hours of rest and sleep. . . . In truth she is considered a sound and fitting exemplar for every wife due to her admirable qualities, a wife's finest adornment.

But that was not all:

She dedicated herself, her body and her property and all that was dear, to her two daughters. . . . She nursed them with strong faith, piety and probity along with the milk; they came out the very copies of her. She never put a cane to either one, nor did they ever hear an inappropriate or painful word. With gentleness and love she captivated them, and they were more compliant than her fingertips. . . . These girls' fine upbringing and suitability delighted many women. Let every mother follow this mother's path in tarbiya.

But even ‘‘Ubayd did not stay at home. She founded a school for girls in 1904, extending her work in tarbiya by instituting a curriculum that included English, French, piano, needlework, and sewing. “From this school graduated wives and mothers whose husbands take pride in their superb tarbiya, praising this noble lady's energy . . . as she serves homes, families, and the nation.” “The deeds of this noble lady are not matched by many men,” ends this profile.^[110]

Homes and Thrift

Behind the emphasis on domesticity's value lay unease about the national economy, expressed as the belief that economizing was both a moral virtue and a practical necessity. Baron observes that this was especially urgent after the 1907 recession. Preaching thrift as well as “the new emphasis placed on productivity and order” through biographical exemplarity echoed other features in these magazines.^[111]The Sociable Companion praised Siberian marriage practices: a newly married woman must prepare food for her husband immediately to demonstrate her suitability as “mistress of the home.” If she could not do so, this brought shame on her family. The magazine went on to lament what it saw as modern practices locally, attacking “our civilized women” for believing that to enter the kitchen was shameful. The article linked this behavior to the fortunes of middle-class entrepreneurship, spelling out in the process clearly gendered domains. In other words, domestic behavior was of direct import to the economic health of the nation—and to the power of the bourgeoisie to lead other classes. Significant are phrases that suggest an assumption that the family property or source of income is exclusively men's, contrary to Islamic practice where women retained their own property. “She remains firm in this belief until her home is ruined and her husband's property vanishes in the hands of the servants, as she consoles herself with the declaration that she is civilized.”^[112]Fatāt al-sharq also criticized the young woman who scorns the work of the home by linking this to a reprehensible lack of thrift. Mothers must realize that they provide examples to their daughters, and must provide fitting ones.^[113] In the essay “The Women of the East and Economy,” Young Woman of the East romanticizes a local past as a time when women “of the East” led simple, frugal lives, needing no more than “one gown at a time” and focusing on “household duties.” If women had no learning “the like of women of this age,” that “ignorance lived in harmony” was preferable to “modern women's manners and knowledge with the care, anxiety, and discord these entail.” Describing the present as a time of “extravagant expenditure,” the essay situates spendthrift ways as specifically feminine behavior and decries “learned” women's scorn for household work:

She who believes there is shame in the work of the house is wrong; nothing witnesses a woman's excellence and good upbringing as well as housework. It is not enough that she work solely for the sake of working or entertaining herself; she must give preference to the sorts of occupations that lighten the burden of expenditure. For example, she should not work at embroidering a pillow while hiring a seamstress to make her son's shirt.^[114]

Lauding Jane Austen's needlework was not just to praise a learned domesticity but also to suggest thrift and good time management as qualities of the properly “learned” woman.

The space the household sphere occupied in the women's press suggests that working out its relationship to extradomestic work was not easy: the editors themselves, Baron notes, “experienced a tension between their literary and domestic lives.”^[115] No wonder it was a subject that engaged compilers of biography. That it was to be a part of the definition of the new woman is signaled in a silence that differentiates the “Famous Women” biographies from both the lives of those editors and the “how-to” articles and books they wrote. As quoted passages have illustrated, the servants these women had (and assumed their audience had), and the ink they spilled discussing servant management in their magazines, appear in the biographies mostly as negative foils to the competent, hands-on, housewifemanager. Or the servant is the “dangerous” other who steals household resources, corrupts children, and (worst of all?) may not always “be there.” While a few biographies—of Asquith, ‘‘Ubayd, Mary Stuart—note excellence of servant management and treatment as among the subject's virtues, more often it is the “Famous Woman” herself who does the housework, even (or especially) when she has domestic help. For this is part of her exemplarity, one that elides her class position as it celebrates her competence. The 1925 biography of Queen Alexandra in Young Woman of the East made no mention of servants: she was an example of hands-on domesticity. Recall, too, that wealthy Admā Sursuq made time to sew for the poor; her biography mentions her wealth but not her servants.^[116] This was one way in which the liberal discourse of women's “emancipation” in Egypt constructed a classed female body that erased signs of economic oppression and possible resistance.^[117] As it insisted on the importance of domesticity, biography assigned roles in “the management of class” to the middle-class female reader “through domestic signifying practices” that, as Elizabeth Langland has argued with regard to nineteenth-century English fiction, took the form of a moral vocabulary of domestic human management.^[118]But these biographies' primary signifying practice with respect to servant management was an erasure that simultaneously served the domestic ideal, the ideology of national unity, and the management needs of a dominant class.

Yet if the ideal of the household manager became more insistent over time, perhaps that was partly because its fissures did, too. Even the rather conservative Egyptian Woman's Magazine probed, ever so gently, the assumptions implicit in this nationalist-sanctioned ideal. An article on “famous women” in the new Soviet Union raised the issue of women's double burden. The Russian government had given women new responsibilities without lightening the old ones. In conversation with Liliana Zinoviev, the (translated American) writer observed that Zinoviev had said—with a smile—that she and her husband both took part in revolutionary struggle, but that she alone was charged with raising the children.^[119]

Marriage: A Working Relationship?

Malak Hifnī Nāsif's “life with [her husband] was a pleasure trip that lasted only a short while, and a fine paragon of felicitous married life.”^[120] Another biography of Nāsif calls her “the paragon of the good (proper) wife [mithāl al-zawja al-sāliha]” and notes that her husband was “her greatest encourager and best helper in continuing to publish her ideas and views.”^[121] Christine de Pizan's husband “did not block his wife from occupying herself with intellectual matters; indeed, he gave her freedom to write and compile.”^[122] And “marriage did not distract [Alexandra Avierino, married at sixteen] from the various categories of knowledge and literature; she devoted herself to reading, and freed herself to write.”^[123]The representation of marriage in these biographies privileges the notion of the companionate union, which in turn helps to construct the image of the nuclear family as the building block of the nation. This ideal had emerged discursively among Arab and Turkish reformers of the nineteenth century, as it had among elites in India struggling with their own modernity under the yoke of colonialist “reform.”^[124] But if companionate marriage, like “rationalized” housework, was part of the baggage of Western-defined modernities, it, too, was appropriated variously by local intellectuals. When, in 1898, The Sociable Companion's attack on polygyny and Muslim men's easy access to divorce constructed monogamous, companionate marriage as an ideal about which there was uncontested consensus—“For there is agreement in the human world that a wife is her husband's partner in life”^[125]—did this imply the hegemony of “Western” notions for the educated elites of colonized nations, or did it question that hegemony by appropriating that ideal as a matter of local (class-specific) consumption?For colonial Bengal, Chakrabarty locates the notion of friendship in marriage as a British intervention, “reflect[ing] the well-known Victorian patriarchal ideals of 'companionate marriage.'” But as “male and female reformers embraced [it] with great zeal” in Egypt as in Bengal,^[126] in Egypt at least they localized its attributes through a discourse not reducible to European ideological production, in the context of an emergent middle-class elite's double task: to define itself against other socioeconomic strata locally and to assert its authority as the group that would lead the nation to independence.

Baron has traced companionate marriage as a “new marital ideal” in turn-of-the-century Egypt.^[127] If The Sociable Companion assumed its ubiquity, the amount of space it commanded in the women's and nationalist press suggests it was an ideal in the process of institutionalization. An anonymous commentator praised The Sociable Companion's first year for highlighting “important topics, especially marriage, one of the most important, which has been ignored by all our periodicals in the East” (a questionable assertion if one reads periodicals of the time).^[128]

As in the case of domestic work, biographies generally upheld the polemics of the magazines but also probed them. Overwhelmingly presented as a positive relationship for all involved,^[129] companionate marriage is portrayed as a working relationship in both senses of the phrase, a union of equals in which gendered tasks may give way to identical and shared pursuits. This poses an intriguing if only partial shift from the dominant discourse of the magazines, which reiterated gendered positioning in marriage as complementary and fairly fixed. Aspasia of Miletos, defined first in Young Woman of the East and The Gentle Sex as “the wife of Pericles” (following Fawwāz), was “devoted to her husband, handling his every whim, and sharing his work and ideas completely.” Yet this portrait of wifely devotion is double-edged, for it is Aspasia, not her husband, who is described as at the center of intellectual activity and who “did things the strongest men could not.”^[130] Asserting repeatedly that women known for their own endeavors and capacities were loyal spouses who embodied an emerging norm of companionate marriage, perhaps biographies raised questions in readers' minds about what exactly that meant.

Biographies verbalized the companionate ideal as they asserted the importance of wifely conduct—and did so more loudly as time passed. Whereas Woman in Islam's biography of Sayyida Nafīī;sa focused on proving Islam's support for female education, and Fawwāz stressed Nafīī;sa's extreme piety, asceticism, and performance of religious duty, eighteen years later (1919), Young Woman of the East called her “the best of excellent wives.”^[131] While Fawwāz described Sha‘‘ānīī;n, jāriya and consort of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil, as “among the most favored of his women,” Young Woman of the East added “and among those closest to him.”^[132] In their otherwise similar biographies of Shajar al-Durr (d. 1258), Young Woman of the East diverges from Fawwāz in adding to a description of her marriage that “she remained with him in love and tranquillity.”^[133] That there was a need to continually urge this ideal of harmonious marriage was hinted at in the speech by Nāsif that Hāshim attended and reported. Men's and women's complaints about each other were on the increase, she said. “They sense a deficiency in our training, an uneven quality to our education, while we feel their arrogance and sense of superiority.”^[134]

The construction of monogamous companionate marriage as the norm is especially conspicuous when it shapes the life narrative of a premodern woman. Zaynab bt. Hudayr of the Banīī; Tamīī;m “was famous for beauty of the face, eloquence of the tongue, refinement of manners and comportment, excellence of household management, and self-consumption in love for her husband and obedience to him, and working to make him happy.” This ancient exemplar becomes the perfect wife who creates the perfect husband out of her perfection (that is, her obedience and subservience to his needs, but also her trained excellence). Published in 1938, the text puts the stress on “love,” the ideal of the loving and companionate marriage, but where the wife's “occupation” is above all her husband's contentment. The text's modernity emerges in its choice of diction, siting husn idārat manzilihā (the fine management of her domicile) next to more traditional attributes. Fawwāz does not use this diction, nor does she speak of Zaynab “working to make him happy.” She simply calls her “one of the sage women of that time, and one of the most obedient to their husbands.”^[135]

Biographies, like other polemics in the women's press, intimated that happiness in marriage was women's responsibility. However, unlike those other polemics, which stressed women's duties more than men's,^[136] they implied that unhappy marriages were the fault of men. If the spotlight fell on the happy companionate marriage, especially among contemporary subjects,^[137] when biographies narrated negative portrayals of marriage, it was usually the husband's conduct that was at fault; the exemplary abandoned or abused wife struggled with the disappointment, hardship, and increased responsibility that fell disproportionately on her. In a 1921 biography, Marie de Sévigné's husband “did not esteem her or value her knowledge and virtue but abandoned her for the pleasure spots.”^[138] She continued to try to reform him through love.

Did readers read criticisms of specific marriage practices into biographies? It is hard to deny that at least some writers of biography were deliberately supporting feminist polemics on the marriage institution. Witness a brief profile of a Bedouin of ancient Arabia, Kaltham bt. Sa‘‘d of the Quraysh. The Belles ended a tale right out of the medieval compendium al-Aghānī, wherein Kaltham insisted that a man who had spent a month with her marry her, by asserting that “the women of the Arabs [i.e., Bedouin] had complete freedom in choosing a spouse without interference from their parents, so he would not be beholden to them. Do our daughters and parents have the like now?”^[139] The handed-down life story of a woman from the geographic and genealogical heart of Islamic history—the tribe of Quraysh—advances a possible precedent for rejecting parental rights to choose a daughter's spouse.^[140]

Biographies implicitly criticized practices that early feminist commentators targeted. Establishing a legally protected minimum marriage age for girls was one of organized Egyptian feminism's first official demands to the new nationalist government. Although a law to this effect was issued promptly (1923), enforcement remained a problem, and thus the practice continued to draw comment through biography as well as other means.^[141] So did the related practice of forcing girls to wed against their will, especially to marry men much older than themselves.^[142] Juliette Adam's (1836–1936) parents forced her into a marriage with a lawyer twice her age, and “with him she lived a life of abasement and misery.”^[143] Pre-Islamic Arab poet “Dakhtanūs al-Tamīī;miyya” left her first husband “because of his age, even though he was noble and wealthy.”^[144] A biography of Hind bt. ‘‘Utba in Young Woman of the East narrates her fear that her father would choose a spouse with whom she could not live, or “whose morals would differ from hers.” So she insisted successfully that he present the suitor's situation and qualities to her first. If the text was taken straight from premodern anecdotes of this amazing individual, it seems pertinent to note that Fawwāz's earlier biography of Hind had focused more on Hind's public role in early Islamic history and less on the story of her marriage.^[145] In a climate where feminists were insisting on changes in the marriage institution, biographies supported their demands by narrating examples both woeful and hopeful.

Beware, said the Ladies' and Girls' Revue to its young female readers, of marrying the youth who does not earn every penny he spends.^[146] Biographies reiterated this by showing spendthrift husbands as responsible for failed marriages and female hardship, at a time when the profligate habits of the young were a popular subject in the press. In 1914, a biography of Marie de Sévigné in The Gentle Sex showed her working to return her “degenerate” husband to his good sense, exemplifying “the true measure of a woman who is mentally and morally sound.” After his death, she gave her all to her children, thereby becoming “a fine exemplar to be followed.” (For putting her all into tarbiya was “no small thing for a young woman of twenty-three living in a time that was the epitome of moral decadence.”) Yet this biographer also implicitly criticizes the contemporary practice of marrying off young girls to elderly men, voicing indignation that de Sévigné's daughter married a shaykh and became “a sacrifice on the slaughtering table of true honor.”^[147]

Throughout this period the incidence of marriage between Egyptians (men) and Europeans (women) drew fierce comment in all sectors of the press—even as, through biography, specific European women (along with specific Arab women) are described as exemplary marriage mates.^[148] The point, of course, was to turn local girls into partial carbon copies so Egyptian males would not go off in search of foreign wives. It was also a classed discourse. Articles lambaste the “lower-class” European women that elite Egyptian men bring home. To criticize the practice through biography was to buttress a discourse that was instituting the Egyptian middle-class girl, daughter of professionals, as the norm and ideal within patriarchal nationalist confines. The occasional biography became a platform for attacking “mixed marriages.” As it elaborated nationalists' interest in pre-Islamic Egyptian history as serving a semiotics of national unity over either religious division or “Ottomanist” sentiments, Egypt's heritage was summoned in this as in other issues of gender organization. An ancient and elite Egyptian, Muhandisū, daughter of a pharaoh and sometime ruler, becomes the ideal “local” spouse that today's Egyptian men spurn:

Thus were Egyptian women of another age the great hope and wish of the world's great kings. But now—alas! The Egyptian man flaunts marriage with a European no matter how base and low of nationality and class she is, so it will be said that he is attached to a civilized woman. He finds the Egyptian female repugnant and keeps aloof from her so he will not be accused of degraded taste. . . . This attitude is very bad; it does not proffer the sacred esteem in which our countrywomen [wataniyyātinā] ought always to be held.^[149]

Drawing on an entirely different cultural context, a profile of a contemporary French writer praised her for prolific production of works “that refine morals” and focused on her recent novel, “in which she made clear the harms that arise from marriage between foreigners.” Delineating the plot, the writer concludes, “thus ended the tragedy of their marriage, as the narrative of every marriage between foreigners tends to end, with either separation or misery.”^[150] Here biography and conduct-oriented didactic fiction support each other as disciplinary discourses, as they do in biographies of other novelists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Braddon, Jamīī;la al-‘‘Alā’ءilīī;.

Cross-class marriages were becoming an issue at a time when economic transformation was producing new wealth and membership in the aristocracy no longer defined elite status. Was this the subtext to a male postal worker's biographical sketch of Isabel MacDonald? The central motif was the decision by England's “first lady after the queen” to marry across class lines, to a building contractor,^[151] values instilled, suggested the text, by her social democratic father.

Polygyny, though, a sensitive matter, was harder to attack, especially for magazines run by non-Muslims. As in the issue of veiling, if biography supplied a tactics of critique, it did so largely by absence. Presenting one monogamous union after another, biography implied monogamous as well as companionate marriage as the modern ideal. The two biographies of Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif quoted at the start of this section elide her co-wife. When polygyny is mentioned—as it is in another biography of Nāsif—it is to criticize the institution. Young Woman of the East did not say that Nūr Jahān was Jahangir's favorite wife; simply, it mentioned no others.^[152] Turkān Khātūn's guardian stipulated that the Sultan Mālikshāh was not to take another wife if he married her.^[153] Such indirect critiques of polygyny, through its erasure, were mirrored in a nostalgic treatment of women's status in ancient Egypt that extolled ancient Egyptian men for choosing monogamy.^[154] A Coptic writer in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine exploited local histories. The ancient Egyptians taught the Greeks about monogamy, even if Herodotus thought it was the other way around. For the “Egyptian government saw a great danger in [multiple wives and concubines], because problems arise when there are co-wives.” Their minds are not at ease, explained the essay, the men pay no attention to their many children, there is a lack of fairness, and the women work against each other and ignore their child-rearing duties.^[155]

The men who praised and urged the ideal of companionate marriage in the pages of women's magazines and the reformist press had their biographical doubles in husbands who are said to proclaim loudly the credit due their wives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's spouse “spoke loudly of her superiority to him and acknowledged the benefits he had accrued because of her. How often she had saved him from slipping into intolerance, and had pushed him with the gentleness of her words, her good guidance and correct views.” Much of his work and fame were due to her, he said,^[156] as Pericles also said of Aspasia.^[157] These two cases seem ironic, since these women gained at least as much public fame as did their husbands. Other supportive spouses are hinted to have been the more intelligent of the pair. Recall that Suzanne Necker's ambitions were for her husband, who “left his private business to his wife; her management was excellent and she spent a share on charity.” Helping her husband, she “gave him her views, which were accurate, got him to reform the prisons and hospitals, and inspired him to most of the beneficial works that occurred in his time [as French minister of finance].”^[158] Elizabeth Flammarion, married to astronomer Camille Flammarion, accompanied him “in all his travels; she was always with him when he carried out observations.” Moreover, “She gave him her sober comments and apposite opinions, for she is no less knowledgeable than he and might surpass him in patience at measuring stars.”^[159]

The motif of the woman as more active partner in a marriage resounded in the many biographies of women said to have given their spouses political advice on “the greatest affairs of state.” The husband of Sabīī;ha “ruler of Andalus” (c. A.H. 335–398) turned power over to her “because of the astuteness and firmness of judgment he saw in her. So this great woman undertook her task in proper manner, working to reform the situation of the nation [umma].” The biography describes her expanding education, organizing the army, putting down a rebellion, taking part in negotiations.^[160] Another biography of Sabīī;ha situates her first in the happy home of the perfect nuclear family, companionate wife to al-Hākim al-Mustansar billāhi. But such an arrangement is a two-way street. He “considered himself the most fortunate of creatures, for he had a wife who could organize and direct, who was learned and loved.” She began to take a part in rule and

astonished the men of the government. For al-Hākim was one of those men who have proper appreciation and give things their rightful due. He was charmed by his wife's merits in matters of rule and administration, so he publicly made her his partner in rule and gave scope to her influence and impact. . . . She did not reach this level until after her husband had begun to aid and support her, to give her the respect, honor, and esteem she deserved.

Was this an unsubtle message to the would-be perfect husband?^[161]

Ancient Egyptian royal Titi Shiri's (1640–1570 B.C.) advice was needed not by her husband but by her grandfather. On the basis of the status Egyptian women held and the subject's long experience at the center of power, her biographer declares that “there is no doubt she raised her voice high and gave a decisive opinion about what he must do. . . . She insisted that her view be preserved, her voice heard.”^[162] And it was Madame de Maintenon who “got [Louis XIV] to do most of the useful works for which his name has garnered eternal mention.”^[163]

A whole subgenre took this motif further, that of “woman-behind-the-man” biography. If pre-Islamic and early Islamic women were lauded for following their men individually and collectively into battle, urging them on, and if medieval Muslim consorts of sultans and caliphs had advised their sexual partners (and sons, and fathers) vociferously, the modern woman in biography stands by (or behind) her man. The late 1920s ushered in a particularly receptive period for this image. While biographies of the late 1920s and the 1930s highlighted educated networks of local professional women, as described in the previous chapter, this was also the heyday of the “woman-behind-the-man” biography, increasingly so into the second half of the 1930s. For several months in 1938–39 the biography column of The Egyptian Woman's Magazine was occupied by the series “Wives of Great Men” (most by one male author). The series highlighted male political leaders; each title subsumed the subject's identity in her husband's: “The Wife of Chiang Kai-Shek,” “The Wife of Franklin Roosevelt,” “The Wife of Neville Chamberlain,” “The Wife of [French politician] Deladier,” “The Wife of Samuel Hoare.”^[164] These texts gave prominence, in thematic order and amount of column space, to husbands' careers and through them to the immediate prewar public scene, but they insisted that the profiled “wives of” should bear at least half the credit for those careers. The narratives profiled women's public action, carefully circumscribed but articulated as independent. It was not because he was her husband, declared the author, that Lady Maude Hoare supported her spouse's political views, but rather because she held the same political principles; often she argued with her husband's adversaries. On the other hand, these are gendered roles. Maude had always encouraged Samuel, “until he was victorious on life's battlefield.”^[165]

The biography's triumphant approval of this supportive wifely role seems startling when we recall that four years earlier, in 1935, Sir Samuel Hoare had become notorious among politically active Egyptians for announcing, in London, that if Egypt's 1930 constitution was “unpopular,” the 1923 constitution was “unworkable”—a declaration that “infuriated” university students in Cairo and sparked nationalist demonstrations.^[166]

Likewise, the sketch of Eleanor Roosevelt in this series presents Franklin's presidency as a partnership. Mrs. Chamberlain (we never learn her given name in the biography) is portrayed as a dedicated, selfless, and consummate homemaker and is praised, typically, for a lack of ostentation and extravagance: “She works in her home in the same way as does any destitute wife. She prepares his food with her own hand.” But what would a reader have thought, turning to the next page? For “this great woman cannot be content with, or fully occupied by, her work in the home. Rather, today she occupies a high position in the life of English society and participates, with the amplest of shares and the greatest of efforts, in political life. Each week she convenes a women's Council of Ministers, composed of the wives of the Ministers of Government.” The text claims great influence for this council: “Many Government perspectives and political projects are the echo of what the wives say and propose in this meeting of theirs.”^[167] The motif of marital influence is taken furthest in the biography of Deladier, for she had died early in her husband's career. It was her “spirit” or “soul” that had inspired him and maintained its steady influence—not to mention her domesticity: “She furnished a peaceable, salubrious home for him in which he found repose . . . and devoted herself to raising his [sic] children . . . and then she died.” Readers might not have taken comfort in the author's conclusion. This widower “obliges us to believe the words of the one who said: 'The influence of the loyal, beloved woman does not appear as deep and pervasive in her life as it does in her death.'”^[168]

Young Woman of the East, although it praised women's abilities to combine homemaking and professional life, did not focus so explicitly on “the woman behind the man.” A few months before The Egyptian Woman's Magazine inaugurated its “Wives” series, a biography of “Madame Ludendorf” in Young Woman of the East carried an implicit critique of those who would give domesticity pride of place, as it inserted an approving notice of the subject's modesty:

She would have gained great renown [as a literary figure] among the members of her nation . . . had not the German government worked to efface the mention of the working woman in her country, giving preference to the active homemaker. But the spirit of courage and initiative, and the qualities of tolerance and persistence, that she inherited from her father made her follow the way her talents pushed her without demanding praise or fame.

Yet this is not as forthright a critique as one might think, for we soon hear of her marriage: “And what a fine and devoted wife she was, what an organized mistress of the home.”^[169] Although, late in its career, Young Woman of the East demonstrated an interest in women's waged work and public political struggles, it continued to assume domesticity and marriage as the core of female life.^[170]

Woman-behind-the-man biography was not new in the twenties, simply more numerous.^[171] When The Gentle Sex published the profile “General Joffre and His Wife” (1915), the notion of the parallel but distinct spheres of male and female as shaping the social organization of the successful nation-state was clear. The text begins by introducing him as a great man, watching over and protecting his army and thus serving his country in the early days of the Great War. With a linguistic parallelism his wife is introduced as a virtuous woman watching over and protecting him. Together they represent “the living forces” in their “great country.” He is propelled by her love, by “the heart of the good wife”; if French men are proud of their military leader, then French women are fortunate to be proud of his wife (whose given name we never learn). He embodies strength; she, loyalty and duty. The text ends by saluting the subjects as both a coupled and a single model, in a crescendo of fulsome labels that name the spheres of national strength and allude to its continued generation: “Greetings, O noble wedded pair. Greetings to the examples [amthāl] of duty and national[ly oriented] life. Greetings to the representatives of eternal, living France. Greetings, O fitting model [qudwa] for fine families. Greetings, O exemplar [mathal a‘‘lā] of glorious deeds and noble qualities. . . . Future generations salute you.”^[172] (Given the British Protectorate imposed on Egypt months before, perhaps saluting the strength of French society and military prowess had more than one significance.)

The Magazine of the Women's Awakening, sometimes considered “conservative,” as I have said, because it articulated an Islam-oriented perspective, in fact gave little prominence to women-behind-the-men, al-though one of its biographies of Jeanne d'Arc waxed eloquent on women's behind-the-scenes importance. Of course, the same point could be made in other ways. In April 1935, the magazine's cover showed a nuclear family, in a European-style parlor, father reading out loud, mother sewing, elder brother listening attentively (his fez a smaller copy of his father's), and the two youngest children playing on the floor with a toy horse and doll, respectively. Over the side table hangs a large, framed and labeled picture of the Ka‘‘ba in Mecca.

But it is from the second half of the 1920s that these “wife-behind-the-husband” sketches proliferate, particularly in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine.^[173] When “al-Zahra” (the Upper Egyptian Coptic writer and translator Olivia ‘‘Abd al-Shahīī;d) wrote the life of “Mrs. Darwin”—again, we never learn her first name—she began with the subject's marriage. Totally embedded in her husband's life, Mrs. Darwin fulfilled the author's opening declaration: “Surely the history of wives of great men yields a detailed portrait of their husbands' history. Among them there was not a one who exerted herself and her forces to furnish the means of repose to her husband, and to share the responsibilities of his work, as much as Mrs. Darwin.” He could not have done what he had done “if he had married a woman who was not good”—or appropriate or suitable or sound (ghayr sāliha). “But Mrs. Darwin was one of those women who are calm, devoted, and distinguished superbly by zealous concern, sympathy, and self-sacrifice, exerting the self and all that is dear for the sake of the other's comfort.” Al-Zahra makes this point over and over, praising the subject's “detailed program” for her domestic life (and her forbearance in having her home “crowded” with insects). Here is the biography of a companionate marriage. Husband and wife spent their evenings playing backgammon; she had to curb his love of sweets. Appropriate to the theme, there is more here on his personality than hers. And God blessed him with eight children whom “he brought up on virtue and fine morals, teaching them the lessons of personal freedom.” As her role in raising the children is minimized, she becomes his mother, doubly the “woman-behind-the-man” as she shows him “the compassion of the merciful mother to her only son.”^[174] Briefly the author mentions that she reviewed his manuscripts, too.

Even feminist educator Nabawiyya Mūsā (1886–1951), who dedicated her life to teaching and running girls' schools and never married, offered this narrative of intensely companionate marriage based on loyal female domesticity in her magazine's “Famous Women” series. A profile of Marie Curie begins with an autobiographical echo of Mūsā's own struggle: “The young woman suffered many hardships for the sake of [completing her education]. She expended extraordinary effort until finally in 1891 she was able to enroll in the Sorbonne.” But much of the narrative centers on Pierre's courting, and then on Marie's trials as a novice homemaker. Yet as it privileged domesticity, this text highlighted the difficulties of a married woman's life: “Marie's life was harder than her husband's, for in addition to her work in the laboratory she had to undertake all those matters particular to women. Yes, Marie was a cook and server as she was an astounding scholar. When married, she could not neglect material matters as she had done when restricting herself to scientific study.” A whole section on “Marie, home manager” shows how heavy her burden was, as it describes her pride at Pierre's domestically oriented praise. And “not a year passed before she was a skilled cook. Thus was her day divided: eight hours of research and three for the household, which is the basis in the life of every successful wife.” If her life “would be eternally mentioned in history, next to Edison's and Marconi's,” it is not her science that we hear of here.^[175]Yet the text poses a critique of the burdens visited on women by “companionate” marriage.

Asserting that women-behind-the-men ought to be known, in the same breath and consistently biographies extol the virtues of modesty and retirement as well as simplicity and thrift. “The politician might be very famous, and perhaps his wife is the cause behind his fame, but people do not know,” complains The Gentle Sex's biography of Lady Margaret Asquith (1864–1945). The biography focuses only on her wifely role and skill as political hostess, eschewing mention of her support for feminist goals, her writing, or her flamboyance.^[176] When a prominent man's love for his spouse is said to be generated by his respect for her intelligent advice (in the biographies she is also usually “possessed of a good share of beauty”), the image includes a training in modesty, as in a biography-obituary of Queen Margherita of Italy:

Her husband loved her as much as he respected her, because of the fine mind, far-sightedness, loyalty in loving the people and impartial concern for their interest. He came to her in everything, telling her his ideas and secrets, seeking her advice in administering the kingdom's affairs. She met him with useful advice and well-thought-out views . . . losing sleep over the interests of his flock.”

But her husband's esteem for her did not puff her up with the spirit of arrogance. Rather, it made her respect him all the more, and feel ever more ready to respond to his requests.^[177] Passing away the previous month, the biography ends, Margherita “left a legacy of examples worthy to be followed.”^[178] Of course, she also had “the best sort of upbringing.”^[179]

Interrogating the place of domesticity and marriage in women's lives could emphasize the common lot of women, downplaying differences, for example, between women of “East” and “West.” Such qualities as these “women-behind-the-men” are said to possess, for example, occlude the unequal power relationships of imperialism. Safiyya Zaghlūl (1876–1946), spouse of Egypt's nationalist leader, and Lady Roberts, spouse of Britain's late commander in chief in India, are both exemplary. For “history . . . is replete with cases of wives who gave their husbands devoted service . . . not to mention undertaking the affairs of their domestic kingdom.”^[180] The motif of the “woman-behind-the-man” was a perfect way to advance the notion of companionate marriage as socially and nationally productive. And if this motif could articulate a certain measure of female power, it also warned of female responsibility for national success (or the lack of it). Had Lady Roberts “been full of self-love or lacked natural or moral courage, Lord Roberts would not have reached the rank of Commander . . . rather, she would have turned him from his determination, and stood as an obstacle in the path of his advancement. How lucky is humanity in this devoted service and rare dedication.”^[181] Or, how lucky was the British Empire.

But awareness of local agendas permeated biography, too. A profile of Wayzero, empress of Ethiopia, summarized from a book in press on “Wives of the Great,” calls her “a good exemplar in nationalism and sacrifice.” In Ethiopia's war against Italy she did not want to appear on the battlefield as previous empresses had done, for she believed women had spheres (or battlefields: mayādīn) other than that of war. She herself preferred to cook and bind wounds, a role that would have been familiar to premodern Arab “Famous Women.” Praised as devout and modest, the empress is criticized for attachment to tradition, for listening to the priests, for being “against civilization and the awakening [al-nahda].”^[182] The biography thus becomes simultaneously an encomium to separate gendered social roles in which “woman” is associated with “nurture” and “compassion,” a blueprint for female action as both retiring and publicly significant, and an attack on social forces that resist reform. What clearer statement could there be of (a certain) domesticity as synonymous with a desired modernity capable of powerfully resisting European imperialism?

The complexity of both agendas and lives (and a fine twist on the themes of companionate marriage and the woman-behind-the-man) emerges in an article praising Jurjīī; Bāz for his efforts on behalf of female education and raising women's status: this, says The Ladies' Revue, is how Bāz serves his nation. If Bāz's agenda goes forward, there will come a time in which women will produce the kind of men “that women want.” Expressing regret that his magazine (the Beirut-based al-Hasnā’ء) has closed, the author comments:

If one means to further his call has been shut, another is open; and it is more influential and effective. We mean his fine spouse, no less desirous than he of serving the country in the same way: that of elevating the Eastern woman. She has a rare advantage among women, for she is a physician. Her honorable profession provides an ongoing relationship with various women, in whom she instills sound instruction and noble morals. She is their finest exemplar of the refined woman, the best model of the contemporary lady who works to benefit the nation as community.^[183]

For if the “woman-behind-the-man” becomes increasingly popular as the twenties and thirties pass, so does a rewriting of lives that can be interpreted as feminist. Jamīī;la bt. Nāsir al-Dawla al-Hasan b. ‘‘Abdallāh b. Hamdān—“Jamīī;la the Hamdāniyya”—was “famous among the women of the Arabs [Bedouin] for intelligence, wisdom, and generosity. Nature shaped her with the most splendid jewels of Her beauty; she was perfect of appearance and nature.” Growing up in “the cradle of luxury,” she showed early “the imminent signs of quickness and a love of learning. She was a far-sighted thinker who understood the errors of the social structure; the lowness of women's status and the denial of her rights pained her. So she refused to marry, loathing the idea of a man ruling her. She was firm in her resolve to remain a virgin until life's end, despite the many suitors that swarmed around her, desiring marriage.”^[184]

Mothering

“It is astounding,” remarks the Egyptian Woman's Magazine as it profiles “Mothers of Famous Men,” “that the woman who taught George Washington honorable virtues and the principles that made him able to undertake his immortal deed . . . does not get the attention and respect from people that she deserves.” But, the magazine adds immediately, “this neglect, we discovered after investigation, is simply an indication of her desire for modesty and retirement.”^[185]

Mothers-behind-the-sons were ubiquitous in this press. As we have seen, the active and educated mother was a visible protagonist in the discursive politics of women's magazines. The biographical subject enacted these polemics by representing the consummate mother. Two sketches of George Sand published sixteen years apart suggest how the image of the perfect mother grew more explicit, more pointed over time. After her divorce, said Fawwāz in Scattered Pearls (1894), “[Sand] concerned herself with her children's upbringing.” In 1910, Young Woman of the East, apparently copying that biography, added a qualifying phrase: “[Sand] concerned herself with her children's upbringing as is fitting for a wise and rational mother.”^[186]

Like domestic management, motherhood emerges through biography both as a sole occupation that commands respect and demands knowledge and as one privileged duty among several pursuits. Either way, biographies sternly legislate individual agency: the worst mother is a passive one. This mirrored the discourse of the women's and reformist-nationalist presses. As in the West, “motherhood was discussed almost as if it were a fourth branch of government, a device that ensured social control in the gentlest possible way.”^[187] Repeatedly, great claims are made for motherhood: “No great male person comes into this existence,” declares another article on “Mothers of Famous Men” in The Egyptian Woman's Magazine, “without being preceded by a great female person.” The rhetorical progression of this essay fascinates. Beginning with an epigraph in which, it explains, wālid (male parent) refers to both fathers and mothers, by the end of the first paragraph it is solely mothers who are the focus. And the conclusion? “From reading biographies of the famous, we see that fathers often chose positions and occupations for their sons to which the children did not incline; no one extracted them from these dilemmas and set them on the right paths except their mothers.”^[188]

A woman's attention to her children's trained upbringing is paramount, for a proper mother is reflected in her children's tarbiya, declares “the Queen of Spain” (María Christina).^[189] In the world of the “Famous Women” columns, queens are as good at hands-on mothering as they are at housework. Queen Victoria “spent at least an hour a day playing with her children. . . . It is useful in this regard to note that this fine queen who left an excellent impact was a model to women in her children's upbringing.”^[190] And as magazine polemics and the prescriptive book industry complained of Egyptian women who left their children to the servants,^[191] in biography servants never appear rearing children.^[192] Biographies that insisted on the hands-on motherhood of “Famous Women” implied the same message, as did biographies like the Ladies' and Girls' Revue's obituary of teacher Jessie Hogue, who produced “trained mothers.” The evocations of exemplarity both general and pointed, the transformations of polite discourse into didactic exhortation, the use of historical exempla and comparison, intergender and intergeographic contrasts, came together in the service of this term that resounds throughout these biographical texts and indeed throughout the women's press and nationalist and reformist discourse in general throughout this period: tarbiya. The term comes to the fore with the biographical subject as mother. Sound tarbiya as the ultimate mark of the good mother was posed as the antithesis of those social practices that the press lambasted. It was domesticity that brought together qualities of the good/bad woman that we saw in the last chapter. Mariyānā Marrāsh's

three children followed in her footsteps in their intelligence, for [in their mother] they had a good trainer of children [murabbiyya], a tender mother, a paragon in polite behavior and home management. . . . For she is not like the rest of the Europeanized Eastern women who work to drain their husbands' blood through what they spend on whimsical, flimsy European clothes, and in how they dedicate their time to superstitions, foolishness, and idleness, censuring others as they gamble and pursuing other disgraceful acts.^[193]

Child rearing was a national issue in more than one sense. The editor of The Sociable Companion reported a conversation with an unnamed man who criticized “the Eastern, Ottoman woman of the middle and upper classes” for hiring foreign nursemaids and nannies and then sending their children to foreign schools. Both practices separated them not only from their mother tongue but also from the watan itself. But in the name of national unity, it was apparently not enough to hire a local child minder. Mothers were to raise their own children, and hence “refining” or “training” them was the linchpin of national unity.^[194] It is noteworthy, I have suggested, that ancient Egyptian women appeared as trained housewives and mothers in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine.^[195] And it is a message that stretches across nations and ethnicities: “[Madame de Maintenon's] goal at the Sancerre school was to prepare for the sons of her nation [abnā’ء watanihā] wise mothers, cognizant of their duties and competent in undertaking them. . . . She derided schools that made no mention of marriage in female pupils' hearing, that were more interested in fancy than in the truth.”^[196]

We saw in the last chapter that the tropes of girls' education and motherhood were intertwined. The proper mother produced through biography educates her daughter into good motherhood, as does the teacher. This image reprises other material in the magazines, upholding a rhetorical pattern that consistently surfaced in discourse on female education. To insist on the importance of educating girls was in fact an insistence on the importance of training sons—not “daughters and sons”—to be “fine national[ist] citizens.” Girls are subjects as future mothers.^[197] Of course, this had everything to do with an instrumental focus that arose from the intersection of nationalism and motherhood. A girl's education was to benefit the nation first, through its direct impact on her sons. Any other possible life goals are rarely at issue here.^[198] Yet if writers felt they had to emphasize benefits to the nation, perhaps biography provided a way out by focusing on girls' and women's own trajectories, their own struggles to attain their goals, despite the heavy rhetoric of national and family benefit that framed those life stories. We can only speculate about the extent to which this articulates a strategic rhetoric.

For a different context, Kerber notes, “The Republican Mother was an educated woman who could be spared the criticism normally addressed to the Learned Lady because she placed her learning at her family's service.” Defining women by their family work, the image could be mobilized in the name of women's public work as reformers under the banner of “maternalism.”^[199] In Egypt the double potential of this rhetoric grew increasingly forceful in the magazines of the 1920s. An essay in Young Woman of the East sounded a familiar note by emphasizing the value of female education for enlightened motherhood. But from being “half the nation” woman becomes “the nation in its entirety.” For its felicity is due ultimately to her impact, and “every sincere nationalist, every male and female writer, must train interest on her elevation.”^[200] On the one hand, the female is subsumed in motherhood, given no (rhetorical?) choice in fashioning an identity; on the other, she swallows up the (passive) male in the utter comprehensiveness of her importance. As Armstrong argues for the trope of domesticity in English fiction, the “separation” between public and private cannot be seen either as wholly imposed from without or as signaling a depoliticizing or repressive move. Separating “the language of sexual relations from the language of politics” was, to the contrary, a power move, toward “a new form of political power.”^[201] Even though, as we have seen, narrated lives showed education leading to other careers, education for domesticity was a biographical constant. Wilhelmina is lauded for giving her daughter an education, but it is not Juliana's intellectual training on which the biography focuses. “Princess Juliana has experience in preparing delicious food, and she takes pride in this.” As in other biographies of royals, the desire to show simple living and hands-on domestic work as unimpeachably respectable, coupled with the focus on female education as forming the perfectly prepared middle-class woman, come together to funnel “education” into “food preparation.”^[202]

Whatever a “Famous Woman” had been or done, at whatever historical moment, she might qualify as a paragon of modern motherhood, bringing up useful sons or daughters trained to raise useful sons: “There is no doubt that Titi Shiri had prepared her children from a young age with advice and guidance.”^[203] The Marquise de Rambouillet's (1588–1665) mother “nursed her with the milk of virtue and love of knowledge, and gave special concern to her training.” And high status makes no difference: “She is the queen of Belgium. I write of her not as a queen, but as a mother for whose head compassion has laced a wreath; no longer does she take notice of the royal crown.”^[204]

Mothers are praised for compassion, but biographies tend to privilege the duty of tarbiya over emotional support.^[205] As in the biography of Almāza Kayrūz, women's mothering role is constructed as actively contributing to their children's successes; mothers of biographical subjects, as I noted in the last chapter, are lauded for pursuing daughters' educations; then they are said to have been influential for their daughters' careers.^[206] This was especially so in girls' education, not just in schools but also at home. If seeking knowledge was “everyone's duty”—as Woman in Islam's profile of Sayyida Nafīsa declared—this was not only an invitation to action directed at girls but also a matter of parental responsibility. Even as biographies celebrated supportive, educating fathers, they maintained that mothers were in charge of children's training. This probably reflected not just the division between early childhood training at home and later training in school but also the lived experience of women writers, for fathers—more likely to be educated themselves, and circulating outside the home—were in more of a position to advocate for their daughters' formal education. And if they were educated, they had no excuse for laxity, biographies harshly critical of unsupportive fathers imply.^[207] Yet this motif also underlined male modernist nationalists' interests. One reason they pushed girls' education was to increase the chances that rising liberal professionals like themselves could find educated wives who would reportedly be good companions, skilled home managers, and, of increasing interest, respectably articulate appendages in public. Perhaps this was why most “woman-behind-the-man” biographies, when attributed, were by male writers. The order of importance ascribed to a woman's work as mother and career woman parallels the precedence given to home management. As noted earlier, the biography of Queen Victoria in Young Woman of the East concludes “and thus was this queen a skilled and knowledgeable person, a virtuous wife, an excellent mother, a skilled mistress of the home—just as she was an august ruler.” This was not a finale found in the otherwise similar biography in Scattered Pearls sixteen years earlier. Nefertari exemplifies “the good, proper mother and the striving spouse”; only then is she also “the noble queen and wise administrator.” At the same time, this ordering of roles concludes a text that describes Ahmose Nefertari as the first Egyptian queen to actually rule despite the presence of a legal heir, and “this is one of the proofs of the strong influence of women at that time.” Similarly, two biographies of María Christina of Spain, one published in 1898 and the other in 1934, mention that she ruled the nation after her husband's death as regent for her son, but especially in the later sketch it is her mothering that is central.^[208] Marie de Sévigné's life history begins by foregrounding the social contingency that shapes women's pursuits: “It is a great thing for a woman to be proud of her brilliant abilities—not because such brilliance is rare, but because circumstances make brilliance in women a rare happenstance.”^[209] But if the reader expects a discussion of that “brilliance,” she must wait, for the biographer declares that “one can write of de Sévigné's life as wife, mother, and famous writer”—and does so in that order. The section on her intellectual, writing life is not only last but also shortest.

Inscribed at the center of hundreds of biographical sketches, domesticity derived its importance both from its relation to women's lived experience and from the urgency of defining the relationship between gender and space in a developing ideology of the nation. But there is no suggestion in these texts—or in other texts in the early Arabic women's press, with rare exceptions—that major acknowledged transformations in the social organization of gender, ones that might make (even some) women's lives easier or more guided by notions of self-fulfillment, must or should follow from heralded changes in women's lives. As Matthews says with regard to the deployment of domesticity in nineteenth-century North American rhetoric, “There was nothing naïve about using the home to justify female activism. Rather, using the home was a brilliant and hard-headed tactic.” But it is just as important to recall her warning: “Domestic feminism was sounder as a tactic than as a long-term strategy because it necessarily employed arguments that took women away from the natural rights case for female participation in public life and toward asymmetrical sex roles.”^[210] In neither the United States nor Egypt did “domestic feminism” radically transform ideas about what women should be doing, although it could expand their domain. In this context it is useful to recall the concept of maternalism as developed by scholars of women's activisms on state maternal and child health policy. “Maternalism” designates the multiple meanings and effects that could accrue when women advanced a notion of the maternal as directly pertinent to work in the sphere of state policy. As Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have noted, under this banner women could work deliberately toward autonomy in their own lives. Yet the banner could be appropriated by paternalist forces working “on behalf of infants, the race, and the nation.”^[211] The domestic could, and did, inscribe many things to many people.^[212] Support for girls' education and women's right to paid employment were premised on collective social (and implicitly class-based) need rather than individual desire: education for sober motherhood, wages to support a family lacking a male head. If one's career could not be subsumed under either rubric, then it must be glossed as self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation.

Home and Nation

If domesticity delineated a space of both regulation and self-affirmation for women, it also represented a source and microcosm of nationalist effort. The instrumentality of the idea of home, with “woman” written at the center, to the concept of nation has engaged much recent scholarship across many histories.^[213] In Egypt as in other sites of nationalist struggle, the inscription of the maternal body onto the map of nationalist aspirations (both modernist and conservative) has been identified as constitutive of nationalist ideologies. This nationalist maternal body figures centrally in discourses on gender in Egypt through this period.^[214] Ahmad's Magazine of the Women's Awakening linked this maternal embodied nationalism to the exemplarity of gendered biography amid the fervent nationalist activism of 1921, in a call “To Our Girls”:

I do not neglect to give you your due, O noble Egyptian young woman, for you have learned what prepares you to be a mother in the true sense. You are able to read the life histories of those who came before, and to extract from the treasures of literature that which nourishes growing ones. For it is you upon whom the felicity of your nation rests, through raising your children, working for your spouse's repose, and managing your home.

Do not think that you are the first young woman to want reform and yet meet resistance. Go back to the histories of the Arab women of the desert. Look to your grandmothers, your mothers, and the strength of resistance in struggle that they had. . . .

I do not deem you anything but well acquainted with the situations of the Bedouin women, mistresses of seclusion, and famous women I have mentioned. All you lack is to follow the path they attained.

You are the entire national community. You are its glory. You are the hopes of the Egyptians, and from you the nation requires the emergence of the most skilled male nationalists [wataniyyīn] and intellectual leaders.^[215]

Nationalist resistance through economic boycotts as well as more direct means, and whether in the Revolutionary-period North American colonies or in Egypt in 1919, needed women and made “the form of female patriotism” an issue.^[216] The consolidation of a successful American nationalism had depended on the political role of the home; not only boycotts but also cookbooks were patriotic tools that had distanced a new polity from the “mother” country through both resistance and formation of a new collective identity.^[217] Constructing domesticity in local, authentic terms (linking it to images of ancient Egyptian women, early Muslim women, and contemporary Egyptian peasant women, and thereby occluding its role in middle-class economic ascendancy) was one response to the perceived strength of colonial powers.

Thus biography casts mother and wife as perfect females and perfect female political subjects. While the companionate wife and the educated and educating mother as icons of nationalism were anticipated in the biographies of the earliest magazines, we have seen how texts of the 1920s and 1930s etched them more starkly, as the “Famous Women” rubric yielded on occasion to “Mothers of Great Men” and “Wives of the Famous.” In the context of emerging nationalism, the queen as female model to the nation (or empire, ironically) converged especially usefully with a ubiquitous image, “Mother of the Nation.” Perhaps Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid, first wife of the First Muslim, was the ultimate “local” woman-behind-the-man. As we shall see, she plays that role in exemplary biography at the end of the twentieth century. Early in this century, though, it was not Khadīī;ja but Safiyya Zaghlūl who enacted this role most consistently in “Famous Women” biography. Unlike Khadīja, she could represent national unity rather than an Islamic identity as paramount, while being (conveniently for this discourse) Muslim. Married to the nationalist leader Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl, when her husband was exiled by the British, sparking widespread demonstrations, Safiyya kept the nationalist fires burning domestically. Nationalists continued to meet in their home, “Bayt al-umma” (“the home of the nation,” exemplifying the metaphorical fit between healthy home and strong nation).

Zaghlūl's public role was defined as a maternal one. Qamar ‘‘Abduh, writing in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening during Sa‘‘d Zaghlūl's ministry, implored, “O God . . . from the likes of Safiyya Zaghlūl make for us striving and knowledgeable mothers who sacrifice themselves for the love of Egypt, for You are the One who Grants.”^[218] Perfect exemplar of modern nationalist wifehood, Zaghlūl, “Mother of the Nation,” appeared regularly as one of the women's magazines' shahīrāt al-nisā‘‘ā’ء especially after her husband Sa‘‘d's death in 1927. Featuring her in his “Great Women in the Eastern and Western Worlds Ancient and Modern” series in the Magazine of the Women's Awakening in the same year but before Sa‘‘d's death, Muhammad ‘‘Abd al-Fattāh Ibrāhīī;m addressed the female reader explicitly as he declared that Safiyya would have influenced anyone she married.^[219] ‘‘Abbās Hāfiz, in the Egyptian Woman's Magazine, went further, expending two out of five columns devoted to Zaghlūl as “Famous Woman” in lyrical celebration of the woman-behind-the-man ideal, an evocation that claims privileged power but of a strictly defined genderbound sort: “Truly, the great always and forever need outstanding spouses, and women of great disposition. The intelligent wife of the brilliant hero husband is the pre-eminent requirement and greatest wish, and those to whom nature has not given this gift have thus been denied a goodly share of the talents of greatness, the requirements of everlasting [fame].” When Hāfiz moves to Zaghlūl, it is Sa‘‘d rather than Safiyya who focalizes the text; through his eyes Hāfiz indirectly attacks women by implying Safiyya's exemplary exceptionality. Leading public demands for independence, confronting the British,

Sa‘‘d understood that he had left behind him, at home, an exalted soul whose heart had reconciled itself to bear the ache of his absence were he to remain absent; the agony of his exile if he were borne into exile; the anguish of his martyrdom if such was fated. . . . So Sa‘‘d proceeded on his way without hesitation, strengthened by the courage of his wife in the intensity of her dedication and loyalty. From the house no moans or cries ascended to detain him, nor any fever of weeping. For the woman who, knowing her husband is about to confront danger, does not restrain him as he strides forth for the sake of a mission in which disastrous results may await him, and does not cling crying to his throat . . . indeed, a rarity in the world of women.^[220]

Safiyya's presence contrasts with the relative absence of Egyptian feminist leaders as “Famous Women” in magazines before the 1940s. Magazines reported on feminists' activities, but perhaps Safiyya was a more reassuring icon of womanhood, at least in the late 1920s. And as it was repeatedly articulated in profiles, Safiyya Zaghlūl's iconic status as “Mother of the Nation” vied with another icon, “Mother of the Beneficent Ones,” the Turco-Egyptian queen mother.^[221] Competing notions of who was to stand for the nation, and how it was to be politically organized, were scripted onto the images of female icons. Moreover, featuring “women behind the men” as icons of both exemplary womanhood and nation might have been a reaction to feminists' growing demands from the late 1920s on for political rights, and their refusals to delay those demands further in the name of “nation.” As biography could fulfill feminist goals, it also could confront them. Magazine editors, reporting on Egyptian feminist demands, were more cautious than those at the forefront of organized feminism.

As in the case of Safiyya Zaghlūl, Lady Asquith, and Mme. Joffre, it was often in relation to a male leader's national(ist) work that the woman behind the man was lauded as honorable and unrecognized, her status emphasized by the occlusion of her own first name as she epitomized the perfect partner. No less celebrated was the mother behind the son, willing to sacrifice her son for a cause presented as nationalist, often anachronistically. The “enlightened motherhood” motif echoes through profiles stressing the crucial impact of mothers on famous sons such as Saint Augustine and George Washington (what better icon of nationalist success?).^[222]

Biographies also inscribed the maternal figure metaphorically in a context of service to the community, most often implied to be a national community, imperialism occluded. Florence Nightingale, it is said in a 1909 biography, cared for the soldiers in the Crimea “just like a mother.” Nasra al-Barīī;dīī;, an unmarried schoolteacher, was like a mother to the girls in her school in Syria.^[223] A structurally complicated profile of Anna Pavlova (1882–1931) does trace some of her work as a dancer, but a reproduced dressing-room dialogue privileges her charity work. When she speaks of the Paris refuge for exiled Russian girls that she founded, “we see not the laughing dancer, but the mother.” There ensues a monologue on “the useful training that will prepare them to be the fitting young women that new Russia wants.”^[224] The Begum of Bhopal was like a mother to her subjects. Perhaps displacing the woman ruler into mother made her public role less objectionable. Elizabeth of Belgium became known as “our little mother” for her hands-on charity work, notes her biographer approvingly, offering the perfect paternalistic vision of the Belgian kingdom as one big happy family with the queen as mother. “Motherly” duty as “patriotic” duty exalts this subject and makes her exemplary: “There is nothing finer than following the model of the angels and the heavens!”^[225] Elizabeth Fry's work in prison reform emphasizes this as “woman's mission,” glossing such public activism as nurturing, therefore as an acceptable extension of domestic work.^[226] But perhaps the best example of conflating a paternalistic class politics of charity and reform with the motif of “motherhood” glossing public service to the nation is a profile of Englishwoman Agnes Weston in The Gentle Sex in 1916. She and her aide Miss Wintz had “hearts full of love for their nation, their spirits distinguished by the attributes of bold initiative and courage.” Opening clubs for sailors in the British navy, Weston “was able . . . to spread the spirit of virtue and decency in their soiled souls; she felt indescribable pleasure at seeing the fruits of her laboring to straighten their crooked morals . . . such that the nation received men . . . who were its pride and support.” They called her “our mother”; she “laid the cornerstone of a solid organizational structure for protecting the morals of the navy's men.”^[227]

And then there was the steady example of Zaghlūl. Announcing a “small book” on Sa‘‘d's banishment that “thousands of readers are grabbing,” the Ladies' Revue reproduced a chapter describing Safiyya “word for word, because we are confident that it is more effective than any large tome to teach our women what the mother of the newborn holding on to independence ought to be like.”^[228] Privileging the maternal role and extending it into the nurture of society built a narrative of useful domesticity that fed perfectly into nationalist narratives.

Yet, just as situating the domestic as women's privileged site made it respectable to imagine other lives, yoking the domestic to national duty offered a language in which women's direct public participation in the construction of the nation could be articulated as it gave women more authority at home. From the metaphorical extension of mothering and the emphasis on selflessness, it was a short jump to highlighting her patriotic acts as a woman's main contribution. As patriotism and active participation in a nationalist struggle defined the domestic (if publicized) acts of Safiyya Zaghlūl and Mary Washington as biographical subjects, they marked the public work of Egyptian merchant Haylāna ‘‘Abd al-Mālik, English feminist Emmeline Pankhurst, and Turkish activist and writer Halide Edip.

To read the narrative of domesticity in early-twentieth-century Egypt as enhancing women's authority in the home, and no more, is to ignore the multiplicity of messages these biographies held. They opened a space in which to interrogate boundaries even as they reiterated them. They gave (some) women new models of selfhood to consider as they reaffirmed the old. Readers might be encouraged by the actual narrative of a woman's initiative in pursuing a chosen public career even as the narrative frame prescribed her primary role to be domestic. Judith Newton's argument about conduct manuals in early Victorian England holds also for the material I present here: that “this feminization and domestication of science . . . cannot merely be read as a conservative regulation of consent, just as the professionalization of women's domestic work cannot be interpreted merely as one more argument for keeping women in the home.”^[229] Equally, “The belief that domestic life and moral sensibility constituted a female domain was much more than a sop to the woman. Although it did not seem to be political or economic on the surface, female authority was nevertheless real.”^[230] Both professionalization and the elevation of domestic life operated on multiple levels.

Even as they historicized, celebrated, and shaped women's movement out of the home, biographies incessantly articulated both continuity and change in the relationships between women and domestic duty. If linking women and the domestic was nothing new, defining women's relationships to the domestic discursively was new. In fact, the domestic as a space that claimed attention was new. The need to define how “woman” and “home” overlapped was crucial to (and necessitated by) the shift from a traditional patriarchy to a new public patriarchy inflected by nationalism. The equation of women and the domestic could no longer be taken for granted in a milieu where women's duties were defined in terms of the nation's needs, which could not be fulfilled wholly in the home. Striking for the ways they push out the acceptable boundaries of selfhood for a female audience, the biographies also hedge this expansion, marking domestic duty as central to women's lives. Like many other texts in the women's magazines, they construct a domestic economy emphasizing efficient management, hygiene, and thrift. This appears to accord with nationalist thought that constructed women's activities as expansions of and accompaniments to their domestic work, in the service of the national “family.” As Partha Chatterjee suggests for nineteenth-century Indian nationalist thought on women's place, the domestic sphere could expand out of the home as long as this expansion was regulated and defined as part of that which remained “private” or could represent “the spiritual.”^[231] Yet perhaps this dichotomy is too neat. Could this tidy ideological move not escape its envisioned containment? Did it result in real tensions in the material lives of some girls and women? Could it have had the unforeseen consequence of encouraging women to transgress the neat boundaries nationalist thinkers were assiduously setting for them? Was it an “innocent” way of posing a challenge to emerging outlines of a “public patriarchy”?

Scholarship on gender politics in Egypt has tended to deemphasize the multiple and possibly expansive inscriptions the domestic could generate, the possibility that articulating women's work in domestic space might serve to push as much as to constrict women's movement into other spaces and, indeed, to blur boundaries between those spaces. As it performed a practically oriented ideological task of demarcating the domestic as a serious professional sphere, perhaps biography—with its message that “real women had done it all (but not easily)”—answered a psychological need as how-to manuals could not. That it was concerned with helping middleclass women negotiate new pressures in their working lives is suggested by the different positionings of the domestic in mainstream versus the women's magazines.

Even as a domestic ideal structures one life history after another, biography opens up a space of other possibilities. More discreetly yet forthrightly than other forms of prescriptive and polemical literature on “woman's place” available at the time, these biographies question the linking of women and the domestic by highlighting it as a fluid and changeable space. Equivocally positioning “the domestic,” biography might stabilize feminine identity around the domestic as it simultaneously operated to push the boundaries of what home and family meant—what the domestic ruled out and what it could allow. To go further, emphasizing the domestic as women's sphere could give credibility and even familiarity to the idea of extradomestic activity for women, already articulated in the mainstream press by Fawwāz. Indeed, framing public lives within domestic concerns made the expansive work of biography possible by downplaying any perceived threat to the accustomed social order.^[232] Hudā Sha‘‘rāwīī; herself was careful to remind interlocutors of her attention to maternal duty—the domestic loyalty that made all else thinkable.^[233] But that order was changing. Biographies of the late 1930s tended to present extremes: the “woman behind the man” or the career woman—or she who was intensely both.

I have suggested that much of this biographical writing shows a conscious practice of cautiously providing models for change, a practice I have no difficulty in labeling as feminist. For this forthrightly pedagogical act is built discursively on the recognition that those defined as “women” confront immediate barriers to their own attempts at self-definition. But this obliges us to confront the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of feminisms in that particular time and place. As Inderpal Grewal has insisted in the case of nineteenth-century India, “The formation of a modernist feminism . . . utilized colonial modernity and altered it through oppositions to nationalist and colonialist patriarchy.” Discourses of domesticity were crucial not only to constructions of gendered difference but also to articulations of class and race in an imperial context—to “relations between [or with] women of other classes and races.” At the same time, they offered a ground for an indigenous feminist articulation: “home not only as the original site of nationalism but also of feminism, since it is here that women can resist nationalist formations by rearticulating them as a site of struggle rather than of resolution.”^[234] Deploying the rhetoric of home as nation, as a site of purity, discipline, and national resistance, writers in Egypt also displaced it, making of it a home base from which women of a certain class could travel elsewhere—as long as they returned. For biography intimated the complexity of local discourse on how sites of contact and collision between “East” and “West” were also shaping the mundane lives of many.

Notes