The New Woman - Freedom, Education and the Veil in Egypt #1012309

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction

Every society is built at home, long before a child walks into a classroom — and the person doing the building, argues Qasim Amin, is the mother. That single claim drives The New Woman, a book that takes the most ordinary material of daily life, the raising of children and the ordering of a household, and treats it as the hinge on which a country's future turns. Readers who come to it expecting a narrow polemic find instead a prosecutor's brief: evidence marshalled, history summoned, statistics entered into the record.

Amin asks what a nation loses when it holds half of itself in ignorance. He ranges from ancient codes and customs to the crowded Sharia courts of his own city, where wives sued husbands for maintenance and got two piastres a day; to the infant mortality figures of Cairo, where one child in seven did not reach five years old; to the American states where women already sat on the bench, taught in universities and voted. He writes about what freedom actually means when no one owns you but you still cannot think, move or speak freely; about the veil and the body it covers; about what a girl absorbs in a household that will not send her from the room. He does not ask for political office. He asks for the alphabet, and makes that modest demand sound like a revolution.

This edition gives you Amin in English that reads naturally and vividly, carrying his voice, his irony and his images across intact for readers today. A critical introduction opens the volume, before his text, tracing the debate the book entered and the reformist world it came out of.

Add The New Woman to your library — and let it argue with you, page by page.