"Never hesitate to act when the feeling of injustice revolts us."

Photo by Al-Ahram Weekly [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

• WOMEN'S RIGHTS activist
• Awarded a scholarship to the Sorbonne, where she earned a doctorate with distinction in philosophy before returning to Egypt
• Wrote her thesis on how the Quran encourages equality for women
• Started the feminist magazine Bint al-Nil ("Daughter of the Nile")
• Excluded from the aristocratic Egyptian Feminist Union because of her family's middle-class status, Shafik founded the Bint al-Nil Union to lobby for political change that would improve women's rights
• The Bint al-Nil Union also offered educational and cultural services for low- and middle-class women, including literacy courses and women-only theater performances
• Organized a protest in 1951 in which she and 1,500 other women barged into a parliamentary meeting and demanded legislative action that would give women the right to vote and hold political office
• Despite assurances that the government would address these issues, when a committee was formed to write a new constitution, not a single woman was invited to participate, so in 1954 Shafik and a few other women began a hunger strike that captured global attention
• After ten days, the acting Egyptian president issued a statement that the new constitution would improve women's rights, and Shafik became an in-demand speaker around the world
• Three years later, however, when she started another hunger strike to protest the new president's oppressive regime, she was sentenced to house arrest, her magazine shut down, and media outlets were forbidden from covering her story
• Almost all of her allies abandoned her -- she was kicked out of the union she had founded, and a petition circulated among women's groups stating that "Egyptian Women Renounce the Position of Doria Shafik"
• She wrote some poetry, but otherwise withdrew from the world of activism for the rest of her life

Bibliography: Adams, Ebony and Anita Sarkeesian. History vs. Women: The Defiant Lives That They Don't Want You To Know. New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2018. Print.
Kirkpatrick, David D. (2018, August 22). Overlooked No More: Doria Shafik, Who Led Egypt's Women's Liberation Movement. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/obituaries/doria-shafik-overlooked.html

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