Marriage and Family between the Mid-Nineteenth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

This chapter traces the transformation of marriage as an ideal and practice between the mid-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals and periodicals promoted an ideal conjugal family consisting of a monogamous couple and their children in an independent household, and women’s domesticity as a corollary. The family was envisioned as an elemental social unit in which women as mothers and homemakers nurtured the future generation. Reformers advocated monogamy and discouraged divorce out of a belief that cohesive and harmonious families contributed to social advance and national strength. These ideas underlay the codification and revision of Muslim family law after World War I. However, despite the recognition in the 1950s of women’s and men’s equality in the public sphere, family law, which is based on religious law, has empowered fathers and husbands over female and minor male relations. Religion and the family are sensitive subjects, and efforts to expand the rights of married women in Egypt have faced stout opposition from conservatives. The post-1952 military regime has been hostile toward independent women’s rights organizations, though women working within officially sponsored organizations made piecemeal gains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The notion that marriage and the family are in crisis, a recurring theme in Egyptian media since at least the 1930s, reflects anxiety over the corrosion of traditional values.