• WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST

• Researched, promoted, and wrote about women's health in both fiction and nonfiction
• Earned her degree in psychiatry from Cairo University, and her master of public health degree from Columbia University
• Appointed Egypt's director general of public health, and assistant general secretary to the Egyptian Medical Association
• Founded the medical journal Health in 1968
• A victim of female genital mutilation as a child, she wrote Women and Sex, a nonfiction book condemning the practice, in 1969
• Religious and political leaders denounced the book, and within three years she was removed from her government posts, and both Health and her writings were banned
• Left Egypt and worked as an advisor to the UN on women's development in Africa and the Middle East from 1978-1980
• Soon after returning to her homeland, she and more than a thousand other government critics were arrested in 1981 for supposedly plotting a coup in conjunction with the country of Bulgaria -- a charge El Saadawi denied
• During her two months in prison, she secretly wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison on a roll of toilet paper using a contraband makeup pencil
• After her release, she founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, although it was banned by the government a decade later
• Married three times and had two children
• Although she defended the religion of Islam against ignorant western stereotypes, she also criticized male-dominated and sexist interpretations of the Qur'an, earning death threats from extremists
• Moved to the U.S. and taught at Duke University, returning to Egypt in 1996
• In 2011, at the age of 79, she was among the protestors in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring
• Her more than fifty books have been translated into thirty languages

Bibliography: "Russell, Mona L. “El Saadawi, Nawal.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, Oxford University Press, Vol. 2, 2008, p. 174-176.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Nawal El Saadawi". Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nawal-El-Saadawi. Accessed 22 June 2021.
Smith, Sarah A. (2021, Mar 22). "Nawal El Saadawi obituary." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/22/nawal-el-saadawi-obituary. Accessed 23 June 2021.

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