In the Field
From One Woman to All Women
A physician, author and outspoken defender of women’s rights, CSPH alumnus Nawal El Saadawi puts public health to work in her battle for gender, national and racial equality.
Thirty-three years ago Nawal El Saadawi, M.D., M.P.H., traveled from Egypt to the United States to study public health. When she arrived at the campus of one school of public health she was refused admission. “What a shame—not supporting me when I was pregnant,” Saadawi recalls. It was a poignant and telling moment for a woman who would become one of the world’s foremost proponents of women’s rights.
She could easily have returned home, but instead, as she tells it, “I took a plane to New York to meet with [then CSPH Dean] Dr. Ray Trussell, a fine man. He was fantastic. I was late for registration but he accepted me in one minute.”
Saadawi’s interest in public health and belief in the power of prevention, as well as her personal and intellectual evolution, grew from what she witnessed in her work in rural areas.
After graduation Saadawi returned to Cairo and immediately went to work in the Health Education Department of Egypt’s Ministry of Health, eventually serving as director general. Building on her CSPH education, she was able to bring to her position a broader conception of health, one that reached beyond what she calls “the tropical disease and curative mentality that dominated at that time.”
Sadaawi has clashed often with officials in her home country over women’s rights issues like black market abortion and sexual oppression. in 1972 she was dismissed from her government post by President Anwar El Sadat, directly as a result of the publication of her book, Women and Sex, which antagonized both political and religious leaders. A year later, a magazine that she published was shut down.
By 1979 she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women’s Programme in Africa and the Middle East, but in 1981 she was imprisoned for her political activities. Released after Sadat’s assassination, she has continued to fight for equality of gender, nation and race, in spite of the banning of her books and the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide.
Currently a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Saadawi is founder and president of the Arab Women’s Solidarity association, co-founder of the Arab association for Human Rights, and founder of the Egyptian Women Writer’s association. She has also headed the United Nations Women’s Program in Africa and holds honorary doctorates from three universities.
as an author, Saadawi has produced over thirty novels, plays, short story collections and memoirs, including her seminal work on Arab women, The Hidden Face of Eve, which examines a host of controversial topics from the sexual politics of development initiatives to tourism in a “post-colonial” age. Her writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Saadawi’s interest in public health and belief in the power of prevention, as well as her personal and intellectual evolution, grew from what she witnessed in her work in rural areas. in an essay on women and health in the Arab world, she writes:
“I began to publish articles in newspapers and magazines dealing with issues related to preventive medicine, drawn from my observations of endemic diseases such as bilharziosis and tuberculosis, but also from observing rural and urban populations, then social relations, values and problems.
“[A]s I had once made the link between curative and preventive medicine, then moved on to make the link between preventive medicine and social conditions, I now started to make the link between the social, the economic, the political and the cultural in society. ... This was my progression from the particular to the general, from the personal to the political, from my life to all life, from one woman to all women, from the individual to the collective.” (“Women and Health in the Arab World,” The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, Zed Books, 1997.)