Paragons of Purity
Worries over how national/ist identity and girls' education intersected arose from—or were rhetorically justified by—concern about the rising generation's behavior, especially that of its female half. We saw in chapter 3 that female exemplarity was contingent on (narrated) behavior. Anxiety over the comportment of contemporary adolescent girls and young women was one impetus for magazines' rhetorical emphasis on domestic training as the heart of female education. From the 1890s on, crime rates and the consumption of alcohol and drugs, thought to be on the rise and apparently an increasingly visible aspect of the fastchanging urban scene, were certainly on the rise discursively. Daily press reporting, new in Egypt, gave “scandalous” events the permanence and substance of the printed page; perhaps they inflated the anxieties of the elite's older generation. As one newspaper noted, “Among matters incompatible with moral behavior is the phenomenon we see of women—not men—opening bars for purposes of intoxication, and hashish cafés too. If only those women would limit themselves to that. But no—they imbibe both sorts with the men. This makes them quarrelsome and dissolute, and then they go out into the streets in a state humanity abhors.”[123] If newspapers did not express such worries about “quarrelsome and dissolute” men, these reports intimated fear that old social boundaries were disappearing, articulated further in reports on prostitution in the 1890s nationalist press. Prostitutes were moving into “good” neighborhoods, provincial reporters warned. No one could tell the difference now between prostitutes' “houses” and those of respectable families. The further implication was that (other) women might follow “bad examples”:
One of those women who claim to be pure and virtuous has gotten into the habit of entering a foreign-owned bar at night and drinking herself into a state of intoxication, to the point where she . . . is much talked about. The police staked her out. After she left the drinking establishment, her good judgment and reason gone, they seized her and wrote the requisite report. We hope the justice system will punish her for her famed dissoluteness, immoral behavior, and corrupt morals; for there is no doubt that her presence among respectable people is anathema to proper comportment, especially since the cunning she employs is more harmful than [the behavior of] those women who know nothing of sly trickery.[124]
Could such reports—and dialect poetry, cartoons, and articles in an emergent popular press that lampooned such behavior from the 1890s on—have intensified apprehension about the moral effects of sending one's daughter to school?
A quarter century of “the knowledge movement” in our country, moaned The Sociable Companion in 1899, and youth are more arrogant and lethargic than ever, while the market for foreign clothes has gone wild.[125] Was this a class-specific worry contingent on the ascent of a new bourgeoisie? In her article “Reading,” Hāshim linked the utility of words to the “problem” of leisure, exclaiming that reading is useful to the young female if it “fills her free time so she does not engage in useless pursuits such as gossip, censure, and gambling.” She advised girls to join literary societies. Despairingly, Hāshim concluded (some years before she founded her own journal), “I write these words knowing they will have no further impact, but one must.”[126] Perhaps the words had no effect, but writers continued to pen them.
To focus on education offered an opening to criticize the younger generation's pursuits in the name of channeling them toward the sort of education the magazine supported. To focus on education also offered a strategy to defuse claims made by those opposed to expanded education. Before the turn of the century, a writer in The Sociable Companion was declaring, “It is not knowledge that has spoiled most of the women of France and America . . . but the type of knowledge . . . which has brought the daughters of our kind in the West to this corrupt state of utter freedom and competition with men in all desires and whims.”[127] Ensuing critiques of education deployed biography alongside essays on curricula, methods, and types of schooling, as the learned eloquence of ancient Arab poets was contrasted with a present-day education that taught Arab girls to read French novels and disdain housework, and as “Famous Women” who took education seriously were contrasted favorably with those about them. This articulated an implicit critique of predominant social behavior among the class making up the magazines' readership and, in the production of the exceptional/exemplary subject, showed less-than-exemplary comportment as threatening to the prescription for female success that biographies asserted. Marie de Sévigné, educational role model, becomes the foil for her peers. She differed from the many young women and men at the French court “without employment or aim, living a life of ease, which saps people's sense of decency, freedom of conscience, and strength of will.” This exceptionality makes her exemplary: de Sévigné, “fresh flower” at court and fatāt ‘‘azīma, lived a pure life and so gave lessons in comportment by being an example to others.[128] English scientist Agnes Clark (b. 1844) “had astounding patience for observation and calculation. While her female peers were spending their evenings in amusement, parties, and dances, she was making astronomical observations.”[129] Manon Roland “was not among those females who amuse themselves of an evening chez great families; she restricted her admiration, and her visiting, to those women of true greatness unconcerned with money or glory.”[130] Dutch artist Joanna Koerten (1650–1715), famed for her intricate portraits and scenes cut from paper, “was set apart from the other girls in that she paid no attention to amusements but was caught up in portraying everything she saw, animate and inanimate.”[131] Again, perhaps “local” role models were most impressive, although in some cases one has to wonder whether Egyptian readers found exemplary Syrians “local” enough. Emily Sursuq was sent by her father from Beirut to Alexandria to complete her schooling. Characterized by “the most splendid ornaments of beauty,” she married her paternal first cousin and “appeared to the world crowned by the ornaments of virtue and perfection, and became famous for doing good and rescuing the poor”—representing perfectly the transition from premarriage “beauty” to postmarriage “virtue.” She built a school for girls in Beirut and initiated other philanthropic projects—pursuits, remarked the magazine, “among those matters that so infrequently a young [unmarried] woman thinks of or a [married] woman concerns herself with, especially in this era. For amusement places have become numerous, and among [today's] people the malady of gambling has spread, so that now [1907] there hardly exists a woman who is not tempted by these harmful pursuits and whose mind doesn't descend to the abyss of decadence and indolence.” As inhitāt and khumuūl (decadence and indolence) became the twinned watchwords of reformers in the press, characterizing both European societies and a local and usually feminized modernity they saw in formation, “Famous Women” represented—sometimes explicitly—their opposite. “We hope,” declared the magazine, “for [Sursuq's] continued advancement, and we ask God to make her likes abundant among women and to recompense her in the best possible way for her deeds.”[132] As Sursuq becomes the categorical opposite of “decadence and indolence,” her example draws sanctification through resort to a commonly accepted diction of religious virtue and reward that, moreover, usefully elided distinctions between Christian and Muslim, or Syrian and Egyptian.
But whatever the society of origin, particularly stark examples were entertainers, immediate objects of suspicion; and this served a particular local agenda. Of Jenny Lind (1820–87), The Egyptian Woman's Magazine commented primly, “It was never known of the Swedish nightingale that she spent [money] on pleasures, or that arrogance and reckless frivolity possessed her. Rather, in the bloom of youth and beauty, at the summit of her glory and fame, she was a paragon of purity, fidelity, probity, self-denial, and modesty. . . . She spent all that came to her on charity.”[133] In a single move the magazine presents its exemplary program to women and assesses disapprovingly an image of public gendered behavior that had become almost a local cliché. A 1933 biography, its message was nothing new in the context of reporting on urban girls' and women's increasing fearlessness about public appearances. Precisely forty years earlier, al-Mu’ءayyad had called indignantly upon the state to do its duty, articulating a role as mediator between government and the governed (a function al-Mu’ءayyad also assumed when provincial writers begged the government to provide more schools and doctors). The newspaper yoked “national honor” and women's comportment.
Many who desire the nation's good honor and want to preserve its moral comportment have asked us to beg our exalted government to prohibit [or: restrict] women who ride in open carriages, showing off their adornments and frippery, and weaving through the lines of men's carriages at public recreation spots. Such acts encompass things detrimental to good behavior and diminish the worth of the country's honor. If these women are prostitutes, the system stipulates that they not be present in these locales that are not concealed from the eyes of the populace and leading members of the upper strata—not to mention the presence of secluded ladies from famous families in their covered carriages. If among these showy women are ones who are not prostitutes, it is incumbent upon their like not to ride in uncovered carriages, drawing accusations and raising suspicions.[134]
At the same time, as women professionals were emerging in Egypt, such portraits as Lind's implicitly refuted negative stereotypes of the singer-entertainer, an attempt to reassure girls (and their parents) that the entertainment professions could be respectable for females. Early-twentieth-century biographical sketches of entertainers emphasized moral impeccability and the respectable fame of artistry. If magazine editors could accomplish this by telling the lives of premodern court entertainers (sometimes without reproducing all anecdotes associated with them!), increasingly they could also celebrate contemporary Arab artists who would occasion a flourish of proud regional identity: Beiruti Mary Jubrān, who moved to Egypt via Damascus, was “like a valuable jewel in a heap of sand.” Florence Fawwāz, Lebanese-Australian, had recently sung at the Royal Opera in London, attaining “a position as high as that of Sarah Bernhardt.” Umm Kulthūm was already (in a 1927 biography) “foremost female singer of the East today.”[135] Exemplary for their public conduct at least as much as for their art, these subjects echo a biographer's praise of Sarah Bernhardt that privileged moral example over skill. She advanced the acting profession, “becoming the exemplar whose steps must be followed, especially since she enhanced acting's standing through her lofty morals, pride of self and compassionate soul, her love of good, her work of charity and mercy.”[136] A biography of Russian dancer Anna Pavlova (1882–1931), too, emphasized her compassion and its concrete manifestation in her charity activities.[137] The early 1930s saw a furious debate over the wisdom of founding a training institute for actresses in Egypt. Biographies, emphasizing the fine akhlāq of contemporary performers, added voices to the debate and not incidentally paralleled lives of medieval female singerentertainers in the courts of the Islamic empire: ‘‘Arīī;b, Burqa, and “Badhal the singer,” who “combined beauty of face, beauty of art, and beauty of character traits, and enjoyed thereby a high status among her peers.”[138]
As Hāshim's article suggested, the “problem” of leisure was yoked early on to the issue of education, articulated repeatedly in a context of voiced anxiety over the state of the world, especially observations on “the West” as representative of a moral breakdown that observers saw repeated locally and most often located in female behavior—and desire.[139] To judge by the space it consumed in women's magazines, as well as in newspapers like al-Mu’ءayyad, the issue of young women's willful leisure—a problem specific to, and defined by, the middle and upper classes—generated great anxiety long before the 1920s.[140] Writing from Alexandria, Ilyās Effendi Lutfallāh commented in 1907 (and one wonders how he knew):
Now we often see a girl reaching the age of shabāb [that period just before adulthood] not knowing female duties. You will see her spending most of her day gazing out of the window of her home, waiting to see so-and-so pass so she can criticize how he walks and moves; and then she looks at so-and-so to censure her looks and style of dress. Learning the whereabouts of a dance hall, she flies to it with untiring keenness. But if asked to rise early and attend to the home and its cleaning, she excuses herself on the grounds that she does not have the ability and fears that someone will see her doing these lowly sorts of work.[141]
Contrast this with a notation of how Maria Mitchell spent her daily hours as a “Famous Woman”:
In the library she saw the astronomer Laplace's work Mecanique célèste and the mathematician Gauss's Theoria Motus and read them as would a thorough, careful person wanting to derive benefit. She read many other scientific books but did not abandon performing her share of the housework, whenever necessity called for it. One day she wrote in her dairy saying she got up at six o'clock in the morning, baked bread, repaired the lamps, put on coffee, and prepared breakfast before seven o'clock. She was determined to measure the position of a meteor, so she went to the office and began measuring at half past nine, finishing in three hours; but the result did not fit her observation, which made her unhappy. She left it to another time and returned home to complete some tasks. She read the monthly Astronomical Newsletter and found in it a new way to measure the light of stars. . . . She got up the next day and prepared breakfast with her own hand and returned to the observatory. If she grew tired she would relax with the plaiting known as tatting, and if she tired of both she would rest by reading Humboldt. . . . If unable to carry out observations in the evening because of heavy storms and cloud cover, she would make the next day's bread and tat until sixteen hours had passed.[142]
Victoria of Germany (1840–1901) was another busy “Famous Woman,” specifically “at home”: “In her new home [bayt, here the residence of the heir to the throne] her normal activities were reading, writing, drawing, and etching. She was greatly occupied by philosophy and economy. She translated into English some German books . . . and wrote one on duties of Ministers in a constitutional state.”[143] “Famous Women” do not suffer from the “problem” of leisure. If they have it, they read and write, like Victoria of Germany, or do needlework, like Maria Mitchell, Jane Austen, and Victoria of England, or they turn their attention to charity, like Emily Sursuq.[144] They are almost always of a class whereby this is possible—notwithstanding articles throughout the women's press on how the truly productive Egyptian woman is located in the peasantry.[145]
Magazines yoke modes of spending time symbolically to modes of dress, and both to the concept of national responsibility through the trope of thrift. Victoria of Germany economized so as not to exceed her (princely) income. As the female reader is warned against tabarruj (showy adornment, articulated in a combination of dress and behavior), she is told to economize in the household and in her own person. The female body, adorned and publicly visible, is the locus of danger, the symbol of Western penetration. Female sexual purity, female comportment, and national integrity are mutually defining. In its “Our Blameworthy Practices” column, the Ladies' and Girls' Revue criticized parents who spent as much money on dance lessons as on “lessons in reading”; equally, it criticized those who forbade dance altogether. When the aim was exercise, and dance was limited to the home, the magazine approved; if it was for purposes of “coquetry” (i.e., in public), the magazine censured it and went on to attack “wearing décolleté.” The next month it attacked moda (fashion), made tangible as an imported practice in the European loanword that articulated it. Moda made the prohibited permissible and the permissible prohibited, sighed the journal, deploying the diction of harām/halāl, with its religious overtones and political echo.[146]
The first issue of Young Woman of the East complained that most parents were satisfied to give their daughters a superficial refinement, “polishing the externals so she appears lustrous to the young man. . . . It is better that a young woman not take beauty as the foundation for her future.” The same essay stressed that a woman's finest attribute was “economy. . . . Peace and a simple life are far preferable to all the embellishments in the world if these come with fatigue and fights.”[147] The interrelated tropes of economy, modesty, and national strength—all signified in controlling female appearance and behavior—contoured Labība Hāshim's journal. A few pages on she announced a column on proper clothing for women, for not only do “clothes indicate character,” but, more dangerously, one can read a woman's thoughts from her apparel.[148] So, when The Gentle Sex praised peasant women as epitomes of female strength and seriousness in the service of the nation, simplicity of dress was a marker of excellence. Unconcerned with wearing “fancy clothes,” the peasant woman “knows good works are all that last, and is certain that the finest adornment consists of energetic work, [moral] perfection, and probity.” (That simplicity of dress is ascribed as informed choice on the part of the peasant woman is a stunning reminder of the romanticized vision of the peasantry that nationalist ideology incorporated.)[149]
These were not lone voices. The emphasis on economy in Young Woman of Young Egypt focused more on the home-nation nexus, less on female appearance, but it quoted Lady Astor wishing all women would dress simply: “I always wear black when going to Parliament.”[150] The Egyptian Woman's Magazine's critique took form as a generational gesture when “the elderly woman” censured her young female “listeners” for being consumed by “perfecting your adornment and splendor. . . . Was not our era in its simplicity better than yours?”[151] Fashion—specifically, wearing clothes that would draw attention in public—was an issue of national honor (karāmat al-watan). For woman's body was the arena where economic and cultural imperialism plied their wares and where national integrity answered back. So, in exemplary biographies the female body from Hypatia to Astor is simply clothed, a figuration of respectable public behavior that in turn implies a moral and thrifty patriotism (just as “beauty” is constructed as a moral more than a physical attribute). Warning that, “no matter how wealthy, one should exercise good management and wisdom” in choosing clothes, Hāshim tells a melodramatic story of negative exemplarity: an upper-class woman, refusing to help an impoverished compatriot buy medicine for her dying husband, wears clothes and jewelry the cost of which would feed a poor family for months or years.[152] In biography, Maria Agnesi and Juliana of Holland are lauded for charity work and simplicity of dress. It is modesty and aversion to fame that cloak exemplary women (Alexandra of England, Marie Curie, Angela Burdett-Coutts, Emily Sursuq, Fātima al-Khalīl).
Against the repeated complaints and exhortations of women's magazines, the “Famous Woman,” with her chaste, simply clothed, morally upright body, appears both exceptional and exemplary. If few women know the arts of economy, comments one writer, there do exist “excellent women whose wisdom and comportment befit imitation.”[153] As Malak Hifnīī; Nāsif is lauded for having “spent her short life writing and compiling, and filled newspaper columns with sociological research focusing on woman, her education, and the necessity of her awakening,” it is also her preference for simplicity of dress that Young Woman of the East finds noteworthy. Would the verse biography of Khadīī;ja bt. Khuwaylid that Nāsif had begun composing before her death have carried the same exemplary message?[154] Aspasia, similarly, “was not one of those women of coquetry who pride themselves on [or compete in] jewelry and clothing. Rather, she was among the folk of discernment, raised with philosophers and wise men.”[155] Other portraits link exemplary comportment as represented in female dress to a nationalist agenda, sometimes anachronistically. A life of Zenobia of Palmyra, praising her political prowess, knowledge of languages, and “great beauty,” declares she wore only cloth woven in “the East” to encourage indigenous industry, and jewelry of local black stone, “aiming to divert [women] from pretexts to squander money, charging them to economize.”[156] This text preceded Egyptian women's efforts to institute local boycotts of English goods; perhaps such biographies helped to prepare the discursive ground for nationalist economic activism.
Drawing on John Armstrong and Benedict Anderson to conceptualize “border guards” who police the exclusionary boundaries of imagined national identities, Yuval-Davis reminds us that women are often the most visible, hence the most carefully watched, of such guards. Behavioral practices and ways of dress that threaten an us/them division may become targets of nationalist anxiety.[157] For girls to take an interest in styles and practices identified with Europe jeopardized a sense of exclusionary belonging while symbolizing a freedom that threatened the control of the patriarchal family. Modernity or treachery? No wonder journals offered ambiguous messages.
As magazine editors attacked female practice in their society, “Famous Women” within their magazines were parallel voices, described as and praised for criticizing their peers' contemporary behavior and working for behavioral transformations, usually through professional roles deemed respectable for women: educators, charity activists, or writer-reformers. Describing a subject's reforming efforts offered an indirect rhetoric of criticism that readers could interpret as analytically careful treatments of European practice and then could apply to the local scene. “Most of” the writings of Cécile de Mirabeau (b. 1850) comprised “tarbiya and the need to improve the conditions of family life, and criticism of women of the rich and noble for laziness, sleeping too much, living lives of inaction and amusement among dance halls and gambling places in winter and beaches and the like in summer. These were all among the causes of bad morals and bad health, and they endangered the structure and order of the family, especially since most Parisian women are debauched. . . . She wrote with amazing courage that no other writer of the time had.”[158] Prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) took on young women “who understood nothing of virtue, honor, or good works”; with her “pure and strong spirit,” she turned them into “serious, hardworking, virtuous young women.”[159] Such narratives imply an elitist outlook on the part of biographer or magazine, for—in line with upper-class Arab women's activities—it was the elite woman in biography who “reformed” the working girl.