Publication of the book “The Societal Role of Egyptian Women in the Light of the Sociology of Gender”

Recently, the Egyptian General Book Organization published “The Societal Role of Egyptian Women in the Light of Gender Science,” a book by writer and academic Dr. Areej El Badrawi Zahran, Assistant Professor of Cultural Sociology.

The book came through 6 chapters, the first of which is “Transdisciplinary Gender Studies,” the second “Feminist Theory Currents; Unity of Purpose and Different Orientation,” the third “Obstacles to Women’s Creativity as Portrayed by Western and Egyptian Literature,” the fourth “The Egyptian Feminist Movement and Examples of Pioneers,” and the fifth is the history of women’s participation in Societal work, and the sixth is a field study of the role of women in NGOs at the beginning of the second millennium.

The writer and academic Dr. Areej Zahran pointed out, through her introduction, that “although the beginning of studies on women in the West was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the twentieth century witnessed a significant growth in writing about women in the West.

And she continued, “Women’s studies have emerged in most parts of the world as a field of research, study, and education in contemporary society as a result of the influence of what is known as the global feminist movement in the academic institution.”

She emphasized that feminist studies began to invade universities as of the sixties of the twentieth century, and the first curriculum in British feminist studies was the curriculum that Juliet Mitchell taught in what was known as the “counter-university”. The American government in 1970, and the University of Kent in Britain was the first university to offer a course for women’s studies within its programs for a master’s degree in 1980, then York and Warwick University followed it until these studies became a stand-alone specialization in a number of universities.

Zahran pointed out that “the history of the study of gender in sociology dates back to the second wave of the feminist movement.

Zahran said: “Gender or gender studies focused in the past on advocating the realization and understanding of women’s rights in an attempt to extract power from men.

And she stressed that it also did not care about the interests and sources of concerns of men, but later on a trend was found based on gender-based integration, in order to promote gender equality between the sexes in all activities and fields such as developing politics, conducting research, attracting advocacy and support, creating dialogue, legislation, and allocating distribution of resources.

Zahran pointed out that the trends in the study of gender in the current era are linked to the social forces that make up the twenty-first century, such as: globalization, neo-liberalism, and the massive growth of new patterns of communication technology, pointing to the delay in studies of women’s studies in third world countries, in Africa and the Middle East region, from On the one hand, it was affected by the cultural specificity of these regions on the other hand, and we find in Egypt in the last two decades of the nineteenth century that political awareness emerged accompanying economic changes, as well as social changes represented in the spread of education, as well as political distortions where the national struggle