From Husbands and Housewives to Suckers and Whores: Marital‐Political Anxieties in the ‘House of Egypt’, 1919–48

Abstract

During the 1919 revolution, from which Egypt emerged as a nominally independent nation-state after forty years of British occupation, elite nationalists used images of their homes, marriages and domestic relations to demonstrate that they were ready for selfrule. On the eve of the July Revolution of 1952, in which a handful of military officers swept away the institutions that revolutionaries had fought for in 1919 -a constitutional monarchy, a parliament and a liberal economic structure -middle-class Egyptians used images of households in disarray to decry the failures of those institutions to flourish. This essay examines cartoons from the urban, middle-class press between the 1919 era and the late 1940s to trace the transformation of the household from its role as a site of promise, in which monogamous husbands and their educated (house)wives presaged the nation's potential, to a place of treachery and deceit, where men were suckers and women lost their virtue. It argues that, while the institution of marriage actually flourished in Egypt's inter-revolutionary period, home life served as a symbol through which middle-class Egyptians critiqued their nation's postcolonial political experience.A generation of historians working on the turbulent period between Britain's occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the military coup that secured the nation's complete independence seventy years later has used gender as a lens through which to capture how the national experience was made personal and immediate for Egyptians. They have demonstrated the various ways in which Egypt and its inhabitants were imagined and represented as gendered bodies, both by outsiders and by Egyptians themselves. 1 And they have illustrated the impossibility of separating the gendering of Egypt from that of its political struggle: nationalists of both sexes fought to save 'Egypt as a woman' from the aggressions of outsiders, and to nurture 'mother Egypt' once her independence had been secured. 2 While independent Egypt's political institutions were initially male-only spaces, the image of the nation as gendered feminine blurred the boundaries between masculine political acts and the feminine national arena in which those acts would resonate. 3 Furthermore, while women in newly independent Egypt were excluded from the political realm, and enjoined to shape the nation from their homes, men were also required to display an attachment to domestic life (along C