Nawal El Saadawi - Adulthood and Career

Adulthood and Career

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

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 Public Health and met her third husband, Sherif Hetata, while sharing an office in the Ministry of Health. Hetata, also a medical doctor and writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years. They married in 1964 and have a son and a daughter.

In 1972 she published Al-Mar'a wa Al-Jins (Woman and Sex), confronting and contextualising various aggressions perpetrated against women's bodies, including female circumcision, which became a foundational text of second-wave feminism. As a consequence of the book as well as her political activities, Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health. Similar pressures cost her a later position as chief editor of a health journal and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt. From 1973 to 1976 she worked on researching women and neurosis in the 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 Middle East (ECWA).

Long viewed as controversial and dangerous by the Egyptian government, in 1981 Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine, Confrontation, and was imprisoned in September by President Anwar al-Sadat. She was released later that year, one month after his assassination. Of her experience she wrote: "Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies."

Saadawi was one of the women held at Qanatir Women's Prison. Her incarceration formed the basis for her memoir, Mudhakkirâtî fî sijn an-nisâʾ (Memoirs from the Women's Prison, 1983). Her contact with a prisoner at Qanatir served as inspiration for an earlier work, a novel titled Imraʾah ʿinda nuqṭat aṣ-ṣifr (A Woman at Point Zero, 1975).

In 1988, when her life was threatened by Islamists and political persecution, Saadawi was forced to flee Egypt. She accepted an offer to teach at Duke University's Asian and African Languages Department in North Carolina as well as the University of Washington in Seattle. She has since held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities including Cairo University, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, Georgetown, Florida State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, she moved back to Egypt. Nawal thus speaks fluent English in addition to her native Arabic.

She has continued her activism and considered running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election, before stepping out due to stringent requirements for first-time candidates.

She was awarded the 2004 North-South Prize by the Council of Europe.

She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011. She has called for the abolition of religious instruction in the Egyptian schools