women in modern egypt

Since reading Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, my fellow group members and I were compelled to research more about modern Egyptian women to see if they really are as used and abused as the Firdaus was in the novel. After merely Googling the term "modern Egyptian women," I found this site by BBC News which has links to little blurbs about eight different young Egyptian women. These women are from all sorts of different backgrounds, ranging from the well-educated, city-girls to the poor country-girls.

This website basically offered information about 2 different types of girls: the educated and the uneducated. Three of the eight girls are either in college or will be attending it shortly. From reading their profiles, I can tell that these young women come from families with money. I can also tell that these women's lives were most likely the complete opposite of Firdaus's life.

In their little blurbs, these young women expressed many different things, but grief and resentment towards a difficult life were not one of them. Fatimah wrote about her thankfulness towards her mother for always being there for her and her siblings. Sarah wishes that the streets of Cairo were less crowded and Rana wants to change the school system. These are not the remarks of girls who are struggling to live day to day like Firdaus was.

The other five girls, however, seem to have led lives much more similar to Firdaus's. All of them have dropped out of school (usually before even reaching secondary school) in order to help support their poor families. Several of the girls work extremely long shifts in factories and have been doing so since they were as young as six years old.

Reda, a very poor 16-year-old reminded me the most of Firdaus. She was very poor and had to work hard to support her father, a deaf-mute. She admits to having considered running away. The only reason she hasn't, it seems, is that she doesn't know where to go.