Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923 / Edition 1

by Lisa Pollard

Overview

Focusing on gender and the family, this erudite and innovative history reconsiders the origins of Egyptian nationalism and the revolution of 1919 by linking social changes in class and household structure to the politics of engagement with British colonial rule. Lisa Pollard deftly argues that the Egyptian state's modernizing projects in the nineteenth century reinforced ideals of monogamy and bourgeois domesticity among Egypt's elite classes and connected those ideals with political and economic success. At the same time, the British used domestic and personal practices such as polygamy, the harem, and the veiling of women to claim that the ruling classes had become corrupt and therefore to legitimize an open-ended tenure for themselves in Egypt. To rid themselves of British rule, bourgeois Egyptian nationalists constructed a familial-political culture that trained new generations of nationalists and used them to demonstrate to the British that it was time for the occupation to end. That culture was put to use in the 1919 Egyptian revolution, in which the reformed, bourgeois family was exhibited as the standard for "modern" Egypt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520240230
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/31/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lisa Pollard is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. She is the coeditor of Families of a New World: Gender, Politics and State-Building in Global Perspective (2003).

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
	Note on Translation and Transliteration	xv
	Introduction	1
1	My House and Yours: Egyptian State Servants and the New Geography of Nationalism	15
2	Inside Egypt: The Harem, the Hovel, and the Western Construction of an Egyptian National Landscape	48
3	Domesticating Egypt: The Gendered Politics of the British Occupation	73
4	The Home, the Classroom, and the Cultivation of Egyptian Nationalism	100
5	Table Talk: The Home Economics of Nationhood	132
6	Reform on Display: The Family Politics of the 1919 Revolution	166
	Conclusion: It's a Girl! Gender and the Birth of Modern Egyptian Nationalism	205
	Notes	213
	Bibliography	257
	Index	277

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"[An] ambitious and original work."—
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[An] ambitious and original work.

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