Nawal El Saadawi

Her Upper Egyptian father was a government official in the Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against the British occupation of Egypt during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.

As a result, he was exiled to a small town in the Nile Delta, and the government refrained from promoting him for 10 years.

He was relatively progressive and taught his daughter self-respect and to speak her mind.

He also encouraged her to study the Arabic language.

However, when El Saadawi was 10 years old, her family tried to make her marry, but her mother supported her in resisting.

Both her parents died at a young age, leaving Saadawi with the sole burden of providing for a large family.

Her mother, Zaynab, was partially descendant from a wealthy Ottoman family; Saadawi described both her maternal grandfather, Shoukry, and her maternal grandmother as having Ottoman origin.

Even as a child she objected to the male-dominated society she lived in, with sons valued far more highly than daughters, reacting angrily to her grandmother who said that "a boy is worth 15 girls at least... Girls are a blight".

She described herself proudly as a dark-skinned Egyptian woman since she was young.

Nawal Elsaadawi (نوال السعداوى,, 22 October 1931 – 21 March 2021) was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician.

She wrote numerous books on the subject of women in Islam, focusing on the practice of female genital mutilation in her society.

She was described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World", and as "Egypt's most radical woman".

She was founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights.

She was awarded honorary degrees on three continents.

The second-eldest of nine children, Saadawi was born on 22 October 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla, Egypt.

Saadawi was mutilated (her clitoris cut off) at the age of six, though her father believed that both girls and boys should be educated.

She had described her mother and father as being relatively liberal when growing up.

Saadawi graduated as a medical doctor in 1955 from Cairo University.

That year, she married Ahmed Helmi, whom she met as a fellow student in medical school.

They have a daughter, Mona Helmi.

The marriage ended after two years.

Through her medical practice, she observed women's physical and psychological problems and connected them with oppressive cultural practices, patriarchal oppression, class oppression and imperialist oppression.

Her second husband was a colleague, Rashad Bey.

While working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women.

After attempting to protect one of her patients from domestic violence, Saadawi was summoned back to Cairo.

She eventually became the Director of the Ministry of Public Health and met her third husband, Sherif Hatata, while sharing an office in the Ministry of Health.

Hatata, also a medical doctor and writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years.

They married in 1964 and have a son.

Saadawi attended Columbia University, earning a master's degree in public health in 1966.

In 1972, she published Woman and Sex (المرأة والجنس), confronting and contextualising various aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies, including female circumcision.

The book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism.

As a consequence of the book and her political activities, Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health.

She also lost her positions as chief editor of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt.

From 1973 to 1976, Saadawi worked on researching women and neurosis in Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine.

From 1979 to 1980, she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa (ECA) and the Middle East (ECWA).

In 2002 a legal attempt was made by Nabih el-Wahsh in an Egyptian Court to legally divorce el-Saadwai from her husband on account of hesba, a 9th-century principle of shariah law, that allows for the conviction of Muslims who are seen to be harming Islam.

The evidence used against her was a March interview in which el-Wahsh claims was proof she had abandoned Islam.

In 2004, she won the North–South Prize from the Council of Europe.

In 2005, she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium, and in 2012, the International Peace Bureau awarded her the 2012 Seán MacBride Peace Prize.

Saadawi and Hatata lived together for 43 years and divorced in 2010.