Women of Revolutionary Times: Celebrating Nawal el Saadawi, Jung Chang and Bessie Head - by Morayo Oshodi

Women have fought for equal rights with men for many years, most notably during the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a period which was (and continues to be) marked by revolution and upheavals. From the suffragette movement to the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, women continue to seek the evolution and growth of the traditionally accepted feminine role in all aspects of life.
Women writers have especially contributed to this struggle for equality, wielding their pens to spell out ugly truths and address the economic and political instabilities of their times. ZODML celebrates this Women’s History Month three such women – Nawal El Saadawi, Jung Chang and Bessie Head – who played significant roles in the development of their countries.   Nawal El Saadawi Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist. She has written many books on the subject of women in Islam. El Saadawi was born on October 27, 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla, the second of nine children. Her father was a government official in the Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against the rule of the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. During this period in Egypt, Great Britain maintained military forces in the country despite the autonomy of the Egypt monarchy. Her father, who had campaigned against the British, was punished by being denied a promotion for ten years and exiled to a small town located in the Nile Delta. However, he instilled confidence in his daughter and also encouraged her to study Arabic. Her parents died when she was young, making her the sole provider for a large family at an early age. El Saadawi underwent the process of female genital mutilation as a child. As an adult, she has written about and criticised this practice. She responded to the death of twelve-year-old Badour Shaker during a genital circumcision operation in 2007 in these words:
"Bedour, did you have to die for some light to shine in the dark minds? Did you have to pay with your dear life a price ... for doctors and clerics to learn that the right religion doesn't cut children's organs?”
El Saadawi earned a degree in medicine from Cairo University in 1955. She became the Director of Public Health and met her husband, Sherif Hetata, also a doctor and writer. They were married in 1964 and have a son and a daughter. She published Woman and Sex in 1972, a book which deals with the various violent acts committed against women's bodies, including female circumcision. As a result of the book (as well as her political activities), El Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health. Similar pressures caused her to leave positions as chief editor of a health journal and as Assistant General Secretary of the Medical Association in Egypt. In 1981, El Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine which confronted the Egyptian government and as a result was imprisoned in September of that year by President Anwar El Sadat. El Saadawi was held at Qanatir Women's Prison. Her imprisonment formed the basis for her memoir, Memoirs from the Women's Prison (1983). Her earlier contact with a prisoner at Qanatir had served as the inspiration for the book A Woman at Point Zero (1975). After her release, she wrote in her memoir that:
"Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.”
In 1988, when her life was endangered by Islamists and political persecution, El Saadawi reluctantly fled from Egypt. She taught at Duke University's Department of Asian and African Languages as well as the University of Washington in Seattle. She has also held positions at prestigious universities including Cairo University, Harvard, Yale and Columbia. She has been awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North-South prize from the Council of Europe and in 2005 she won the Inana International Prize in Belgium. She is the founder of the Health Education Association and the Egyptian Women Writers Association. She has continued her activism and considered running in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election. She was among the protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011 who brought down the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and has called for the abolition of religious instruction in Egyptian schools. Saadawi’s other works include The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), God Dies by the Nile (1984), The Circling Song (1986), Searching (1988), The Fall of the Imam (1987) and Death of an Ex-Minister (1980). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages.   Jung Chang Jung Chang was born on March 25, 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China. Her parents were both Communist Party officials. As a child she developed a love of reading, writing and composing. Life was relatively good for her family at first: her parents worked hard, and her father became successful at the provincial level. The Communist Party provided her family with all the comfort they needed, a level of privilege that was extraordinary in the relatively impoverished China of the 1950s. Chang participated in the Cultural Revolution, joining the Red Guards at the age of 14. In her book Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991) she wrote that she was "keen to do so" and "thrilled by [her] red armband". However, she also stated that she refused to participate in attacking her fellow countrymen and women and as the Red Guards became too violent, she left the group. The catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward had led her parents to oppose Mao Zedong'spolicies. As a result, her family was exposed to retaliation from Zedong's supporters. Her parents were publicly humiliated: they were imprisoned, and her father suffered from physical and mental illnesses. Their careers were destroyed, and her family was forced to leave their home. Chang was initially a supporter of Zedong until her parent’s degradation. By the time of Zedong’s death, her respect for him was destroyed. She wrote about his death:
The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives.
Chang’s education was interrupted and she worked for some time as a part-time peasant doctor, a steelworker and an electrician (albeit with no formal training because of government policies which did not require formal instruction as a prerequisite for such work). The universities were eventually re-opened, and she studied English at Sichuan University. She passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated. Chang left China in 1978 to study in Britain on a government scholarship. She studied Linguistics at the University of York and received her PhD in 1982, becoming the first person from China to be awarded a PhD from a British university. The publication Wild Swans (her second book after a biography of Sun Yat-sen co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday) made her a celebrity. The international bestseller is a biography of three generations of women in her family – her grandmother, her mother and herself – over the course of the twentieth century. Chang depicts political and military turmoil of China in this period through the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord, her mother's experience of Japanese-occupied Jinzhou during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and her own experience of the effects of Mao Zedong's policies of the 1950s and 1960s. Wild Swans was translated into thirty languages and sold ten million copies, but is banned in mainland China. Chang has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, and the Open University. She lectured for some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before retiring in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing.   Bessie Head Bessie Emery Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa on July 6, 1937. She was born during apartheid, a time when laws limited the movements and opportunities of black, coloured and Indian people as the country’s all-white government ensured that special privileges were reserved for the white minority population. The daughter of a Scottish woman (who was in a mental institution) and an African man, Head was raised by foster parents and later placed in a children's home. Showing her intelligence early on, she overcame her tough childhood to train as a primary school teacher. After four years as a teacher, she took up work as a journalist for the Golden City Post newspaper. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Head worked a journalist for the South African magazine Drum. In 1964 she moved to Botswana as a refugee, living in poverty in a refugee community before she was awarded citizenship, settling in Serowe. Just as she was starting to gain recognition as a writer, Head died in 1986 from hepatitis. Most of Bessie Head's important works are set in Serowe, in particular the three novels When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971), and A Question of Power (1974). These three novels and numerous other works were all written in Botswana except for an early novel, The Cardinals (published posthumously), written before she left South Africa. Head’s writing often dealt with poor and abused black women and their experiences of racism and sexism, difficulties that she herself faced as a racially-mixed person growing up without a family in South Africa. She portrayed the apartheid struggles and hardships of life in post-colonial Africa and the injustices and oppression of people. Also fundamental to her works was the hope for social change and peace. In When Rain Clouds Gather, a troubled young man called Makhaya runs away from his birthplace in South Africa to become a refugee in a little village called Golema Mmidi, in the heart of Botswana. Here he is faced with many challenges, one of which is the fact that Chief Matenge does not allow his presence in the village. He meets a white man named Gilbert and starts a journey into the unknown. In 2003, she was awarded the South African Order of Ikhamanga in Gold for her "exceptional contribution to literature and the struggle for social change, freedom and peace.” In 2007 the Bessie Head Heritage Trust and the Bessie Head Literature Awards were established. In the same year, the library in Pietermaritzburg was renamed the Bessie Head Library in her honour.   What binds these three women together is their resolute fight for independence within their society, social change and integration among countries, the power of their words, and lastly, their impact of their struggles and experiences for women around the world.